


Ride the Lightning [Fic & Podfic]

by RsCreighton, smolhombre



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Action/Adventure, Audio Format: M4B, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Background Character Death, Captain America Sam Wilson, Explicit Sexual Content, Gay Nerds In Love, M/M, Mutual Pining, Norse Mythology - Freeform, Podfic, Podfic Available, Podfic Length: 3.5-4 Hours, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Post-Thor: Ragnarok, Sam Wilson is a Gift, Slow Burn, Snark, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-27
Updated: 2017-10-07
Packaged: 2019-01-05 22:35:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 11
Words: 33,408
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12198762
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RsCreighton/pseuds/RsCreighton, https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: Sam Wilson has enough on his plate, settling into his new mantle as Captain America and heading up what's left of the post-Accord Avengers. When Thor and Bruce Banner crash back down on the acid trip bridge after two years of silence, he's sure he can take it in stride. He's dealt with weirder.But when the Avengers are tasked with finding a deadly enemy, Sam is forced to come to terms with the realities of his job and his heart both despite the rising danger closing in on him.Sam is honest above all else, though, and no fool, so maybe he should have known. Feelings rarely care about circumstance.





	1. 01.

**Author's Note:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 31:33  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/01.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter One**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/01.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_ **01.** _

“I am  _ tired _ .”

“I’ll owe you.”

“Rogers, you already owe me, quit poking your lip out. That’s just embarrassing.”

Steve huffs like the petulant, hundred year old toddler he is, rucking a hand through his hair. He’s borrowed one of Sam’s shirts —  _ again _ — and Sam can see the white threads of protest at the seams where it stretches to accommodate Steve’s shoulders. If he rips this one, Sam will kill him himself.

“You know, I did get you a date with the VA receptionist that one time.”

Sam nearly chokes on his own tongue. “Back it up,  _ Cap _ . I had that handled on my own.”

“That’s not what you said before. You said, ‘I owe you one, Cap.’ And have I ever collected before?”

Steve is remarkably unmoved by the flat, unimpressed glare Sam levels him with. “When you asked me to help you take down a super-spy, super-governmental organization and hide out at my own private home from said organization only forty-eight hours after meeting me, when I helped you find the Popsicle Soviet against my better judgement, which haunts me to this day, when you stuck your middle finger out to the United Nations and a hundred and seventy two of its member states and I had your back, when I let you —”

“ _ Please _ . If I go alone I’ll have to stay all night, and Rhodey is on vacation with Carol so that means Tony is going to be up  _ my _ ass.”

Sam groans, his head cradled in his hands. 

“An hour. I’ll stay for an hour because I know they’re gonna have better food than we could order in. And you will  _ owe me many favors _ .”

* * *

 

Bruce Banner is Sam’s favorite for many reasons. In one of the low couches on the second highest floor of the new Avengers complex, tucked away in the quietest corner they can manage, Sam lists a few of the biggest ones to himself. 

  1. Bruce Banner knows how to shut the hell up.
  2. Bruce Banner is not a egomaniacal ass.
  3. Bruce Banner, for a few green reasons, does not get piss-drunk on Asgardian ale.



“I’m surprised you aren’t out there. Steve keeps looking over like he’s desperate for your help. Tony had a lot of coffee before everyone came over. More than usual, anyway, even for him. I know he is being annoying.”

Sam had for all intents and purposes thought Bruce was dozing for the past twenty minutes, and he starts despite himself at the quiet voice. 

“You wanna be alone, man? Sorry, I wasn’t thinking you might want to be by yourself. Must be weird, being back after everything.”

“You aren’t bothering me, it’s not that weird.” Bruce fiddles with the sleeve of his sweater, the soft navy knit barely rustling as he rubs the hem between his fingers, well worn there with his nervous tic. Still, he smiles when he looks back up to Sam, if only faintly. “I even got some research done when I was...travelling. Dr. Foster is coming up from Reykjavik at the end of this week so we can go over the notes. You’re usually more social, is all. I hope you don’t feel — ah, obligated to keep me company.”

Sam knows Bruce is cagey about touching, so he is very slow reaching out to put a light, brief hand to Bruce’s shoulder. It’s gone before Bruce has fully dipped his curly, greying head to look at it. 

“I’m happy you and Lightning McQueen are back and all, but I really wanted to stay home and watch  _ Blade _ tonight. Steve and I only got in from Dhamar yesterday, and we got caught up there for a week too damn long. Just not in the partying mood. Or a pitying one.”

“Please don’t let Thor hear you say that.”

“Say what?”

“Comrades!” Living Nordic Ken Doll’s booming tenor rattles Sam’s glass on the little table next to the couch, his shadow massive and all but swallowing Bruce whole as he stands in front of them. “Is there a problem with your drinks? Or is it just the company?” 

Sam rises with an eye roll to greet him, and tolerates the implacable iron of Thor’s biceps around him while he seemingly tries to snap Sam’s spine in half. He’s touchy — Steve warned him about that the first and only other time he met the Space Prince. Sam gets it. Maybe it’s an Asgard thing — Sam has no idea how Bruce survived, if so.

“It is good to see you, Sam Wilson.”

“Yeah, you too, buddy. Quick question, how many sets of lungs do you have?”

Thor pulls back only slightly, his blonde, fuzzy brows knotted. “Asgardians have three lungs, why do you ask?”

“I’ve only got these two puny human ones, and they are really pissed off right now.” 

Thor releases him with a laugh Sam can feel humming around in his bones. The new compound is in the middle of scenic nowhere, upstate New York; not burdened with light pollution and hardly even touched by the stars overhead. Still, considering how old some of the inhabitants are, the lights are criminally low inside, but Thor’s eyes are still preternaturally bright looking him over. Sam’s not had the chance to think too much about Thor, given everything else in his life, but now with his big hands still resting on Sam’s shoulders, he’s made suddenly and viscerally aware that Thor isn’t, maybe, really human. Maybe even in ways that matter.

“I hope Dr. Banner has told you all about his valiant efforts —”

“There were no such things,” Bruce says crisply, rising and brushing off imagined detritus from his slacks in the fluid, practiced motion of someone used to leaving. He claps Thor on the shoulder as he passes. Sam smiles despite Thor’s face falling to slackened disappointment. “Goodnight.”

Thor’s hands drop from Sam’s shoulders as they watch Bruce walk out and into the hall without bumping into or speaking with anyone else. Sam’s body feels light in their absence, like maybe his bones are hollow as a bird’s.

“He could probably teach Nat a few things about not being seen.”

“I hoped he would have returned to his world more comfortable in it. I worry I may have only made it worse in our journey.”

Sam bites the inside of his cheek as he studies the line of Thor’s shoulders, bundled up in a burgundy cardigan that seems oddly appropriate straining over his biceps. It’s cut nothing like Sam’s seen on earth, and the thick material shines in the low light. Sam doesn’t know what to make of it in place of the leather getup he was used to seeing. His hair is also different, shorn close to his scalp, and there’s a new weight to his massive body that Sam could recognize in the blind dark as guilt.

“You know one of the worst things about being an Avenger?”

Thor blinks at him. His eyelashes are liquid gold, heavy on his cheek. “I...the knowledge one day, inevitably, you will perish in your efforts? Dooming your earth to destruction if you fail? Losing your comrades? The —”

“Tony Stark has my number.”

“And he...bothers you with this...?” Thor snaps his fingers together, like suddenly piecing it together. “The Lady Darcy has told me of the ‘dick pics,’ they are the most crude use of your technology. Does Anthony burden you with his genitals?”

Behind Thor’s broad back, Steve turns on his heel where he was approaching, two beers in his hands. Sam rolls his eyes. Coward. 

“If Tony Stark ever sends me a dick pic, rest assured, I will take your bigass hammer and rectify his behavior. No. The worst part is Tony thinks everyone’s sleep schedule is as nonexistent as his, and he doesn’t have the home training to not call or text at three thirty in the morning.”

“That does sound inconvenient,” Thor offers politely, clearly at a loss.

“He talks about Bruce a lot. How he was before. I don’t know what happened with you and the Green Guy up...wherever you were, but Tony was close to expressing a genuine emotion when you got back. A happy one.” Sam jerks his chin to the door Bruce had just exited. “No matter what you did or didn’t do, Bruce’s shit with the Other Guy and everything else is not yours to bear, and definitely not alone.”

“You believe so?”

Sam shrugs, like he isn’t intimately familiar with the feeling, like it’s not part of the weight of the wings he straps to his back. “Sometimes I think you can want to help a friend so badly it feels like you failed because there was no magic that made them ‘all the way’ better, or as happy as you think they deserve.”

“There is magic where I come from.”

“Harry Potter, I don’t care where you come from. No magic is going to heal like time and patience.”

Thor takes a thoughtful sip of his beer, the bottle a rich violet and the glass flecked through with teal and gold shimmer that catches the light and  flings  it back out like weak echoes of a star. Magic, indeed. From where Sam is standing he can smell the herbs in it, hear the little fizzing pops of its carbonation. Sam has been known to drink warm Natty Light into adulthood, when the need called for it.

“You are...very wise, Sam. Thank you, truly. You’ve put me at ease.”

“I want you to say that in front of a witness,” Sam grins, shoving his hands in his pockets when he gets the sudden and very strange urge to put them on Thor in some way; to rub that cardigan between his fingers, maybe, or to reach out and try his beer.

“Samuel, son of Will, the Wise!” Thor cheers suddenly, looking around the room with his glass raised. Sam’s eardrums ache, and after a heartbeat of silence there is cheering that only makes them ring further, like he’s stuck underneath a big bell. 

Thor wraps his heavy, unnaturally warm arm around Sam’s shoulders and walks him over to the bar. “Steven has told me you have an admirable collection of Midgardian records.”

Sam takes the offered seat at the bar, one of Stark’s whirring robots knocking over several glasses in their haste to try and pour them a drink. He looks around for the Star Spangled Man in question, eyebrows raised. Steve rejects most of Sam’s music suggestions out of hand, because he is an asshole who possesses awful taste; Sam won’t let him live this down if he’s been secretly taking them anyway to spare his ridiculous pride.

“Did he, really?”

Thor is almost comically careful sliding a StarkPhone out of a hidden pocket in the cardigan. Sam watches him pull up Spotify wondering if this whole night was, perhaps, a fever dream.

“He was adamant, Sam Wilson.” Thor clears his throat. “The Lady Darcy and Dr. Selvig have helped me find some Midgardian music during my stays before. I listen to it sometimes off world, when I miss it. Would you be willing to lend a friend your expertise?”

Sam can see his very pink cheeks up close like this as Thor looks down at the phone in his hands, realizing Thor is no little bit tipsy. He would be drunk too, if Steve’s abridged version of Thor and Bruce’s  _ Space Jam _ adventure had been even seventy percent accurate. Sam feels his gut twist as he forces himself to look past the little bump in the bridge of Thor’s nose, the massive expanse of his chest, to lean over and grab the phone from its cradle. Sam feels like he touches Thor’s calloused hands somehow too much in the process and clears his throat, looking down at the phone. He is unable to keep from wincing as he scrolls through the playlists.

“I would be a criminal not to help you.”

Thor’s hand is warm squeezing the top of his knee. “I promise to be an attentive student.”

Oh, no. No, no. 

Sam swallows thickly, tapping at the phone and decidedly not looking up. “Well. forget everything Lewis told you. Boybands are dead and so is synth-pop. That’s lesson one.”

* * *

Wanda texts him the next day twenty-five minutes into a run on the treadmill in his spare room.

“Thank you.” 

He’s barely gotten the treadmill slowed to a stop when she texts again, a video of Thor in (Sam loses his balance as the belt comes to a complete halt) a pair of forest green boxer briefs and an ivory silk robe with “Anthony Stark” embroidered on the chest. He’s singing Charles Bradley and valiantly trying to pull Vision into what Sam could only generously guess is an Asgardian dance.

“Sam?” Steve pokes his head in the doorway, hands full of grocery bags. “I was calling you. Are you alright?”

Steve walks over and looks down at the video still looping on Sam’s phone before Sam has the thought to lock the screen and shove it in the cupholder.

“You don’t ever knock, don’t lie on me. Did you bring pizza?”

“...I brought cheese sticks and some taquitos. Clint said the taquitos were important,” Steve says slowly. He is staring at the phone in the cupholder. Sam nearly bites the inside of his cheek hard enough to bleed. Steve is starting to get a look on his face eerily reminiscent of Natasha. He hops off the treadmill and checks Steve’s shoulder with his own, 

“I know this is asking a lot of your culinary abilities, but go ahead and put them in the oven. I’ll shower and we can start the movie.”

“Take a shower. Right.”

Steve is whistling to himself and walking out of the room before Sam can even find something to throw at him.

Sam doesn’t reply to Wanda until he and Steve have made it through a History Channel documentary on Houdini and three episodes of a series about Hell’s Angels. Steve is tucking himself in Sam’s guest room when he sends Wanda a single surprised emoji. If he replays the video several times again after sending the text, that’s his business.

* * *

Thor and Bruce are hardly back for four days before the giant, fork-tongued, feathered lizards find them, because this is just Sam Wilson’s life now. He’s walking out of Dinosaur BBQ with a sturdy brown paper bag when he gets the call. The folded top of it has been stapled shut, but Sam can feel the steam from inside the heavy bag on his knuckles, smell the salt potatoes and pulled pork inside, and he decides then and there that he really, actually, hates his job.

“Gramps, if you can pull anyone else that’s not me I am telling you now, you owe me, do it.”

“They’re coming right at you, and everyone else has their hands full in Midtown. I’ve got backup en route.”

“Hey —  _ hey _ ! This is overtime!”

Steve has clicked off the line before Sam can even make his case. He looks mournfully at what could have been his dinner as a thick, heavy cloud of humidity swallows the block. There’s a not-too-distant thunderclap as Thor skids to a graceless stop beside him.

Sam can’t keep from frowning. If Steve were observant and not still utterly besotted with his new-again, defrosted boyfriend, Sam would feel, maybe, that this was a set up.

_ Backup _ . On what planet, realm, or dimension was a Space Prince with a magic hammer backup?

The ground beneath them trembles. Now is really not the time to worry about it. He tucks the bag under a nearby bench before looking up to Thor, forcing a smile on his face. 

“Hey buddy, you got a gift for me?”

Thor frowns at him, back in his leathers today, an odd bruise heavy as wet ink on his scrubby jaw. Sam’s wings are nowhere to be seen, but he wasn’t really expecting them anyway.

“That’s a no,” Sam groans as he checks the pieces he has on him. Two .385’s in the waist of his jeans, and...that’s it. He doesn’t even have the ankle piece anymore, since he let Wanda borrow it to play with. She has  _ brain bullets _ ,  _ and _ the entire Avenger’s armory at her leisure, so Sam is unsure why he felt the need to give her one of his personal pieces. As far as the U.S. Government was concerned, none of them were supposed to be armed at all anyway.

Sam really, really hates his job.

“What’s the problem, friend?”

“Oh, you know. Bigass lizards in Manhattan and I’m stuck working with a nerf gun and a pool noodle.”

“I do not understand.”

“I’m empty handed, Big Guy. Do these komodo dragons react well to dog whistles and sit on command? It’s all I got.”

Thor’s face splits into a nearly maniacal grin. “You want for a weapon?”

Sam watches him squeeze a massive, square hand in the front pocket of his leather pants. There is no visible fly on them, so Sam reasons they are, in fact, held on by force of suction or alien magic, whichever is stronger. As Thor wiggles a bit in his efforts, Sam really couldn’t say which.

“I don’t want your pocket lint, I don’t care if you say it’s magic.”

Thor finally finagles a small, folding knife out of his pants pocket. “Are you any use with a blade?”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Pointy end out, got it. Scott’s the dumbass, not me. But that’s even more useless than the pieces I have. Just put it back in its vacuum seal, if you can manage.”

A screeching wail sounds from the other end of the street. The beast is perhaps ten feet tall and nearly as broad, pits the size of basketballs cratering its narrow skull for eyes that glow yellow and red and unearthly. Oily green feathers collar its long throat, its scales are flat and bleached of color, like bones. When the thing shifts, Sam sees the space between the scales is all black, hollow void.

“Thor, did you bring a zombie skeleton dragon to Harlem?” 

“I confess I’m unsure what, exactly, I brought to the fair city of Harlem.” He looks around with a frown. “Samuel, surely this isn’t the same city the good Dr. Banner —”

Skeleton War Godzilla swings its spiked — of  _ course _ — tail, and he and Thor fly backwards to avoid being made pincushions.

Sam barrel rolls out of the beasts reach when it swings its massive, taloned claws.  Under the cover of a chewed-gum laden bench, he aims at the spaces between its scales as the thing turns its head to track a now skybound Thor. Sam might be crazy, but there are a few heartbeats in between the sirens and the screeching wail of the beast itself where he can hear the bullets rattle and ricochet inside the thing.

Has Sam mentioned that he hates his job?

Thor smacks the beast’s gaunt face with Mjölnir, and as it stumbles backwards Sam crawls out from underneath the bench. He won’t waste his time or anymore bullets, and even if he feels like a Scott-sized idiot, he cups his hands around his mouth and calls out to his sort-of-friend-by-default currently shooting lightning bolts from his square hands.

“Hit me with the exacto knife!”

Thor’s laugh is booming as he flings it at Sam. Sam might fumble the grip catching it, but it doesn’t matter because as soon as he flips it open an  _ actual fucking sword  _ is in his hands. The hilt is wrapped in rough, untreated leather and suede, worn colorless from use, and the wide blade is engraved with knotted symbols.

“What the  _ fuck _ ?” 

The thing rears back towards Sam at the sound of his voice. He dodges the pointed beak as the beast lunges forward.  Sam recovers and quickly swipes the blade upwards in an arc, getting a decent cut through some of the feathers at its neck. Thor slams at its spiked tail with Mjölnir, and while the creature is distracted Sam leaps up as far as he’s able and drives the sword straight into the column of its throat, dragging the blade down with all his weight as he falls back to the ground. 

Thor cheers loudly as the beast sways on its feet before falling to its side. Sam raises the sword to plant it in the glowing crater of its fiery eye, twisting and pressing deeper until the creature is still.

He is panting when Thor comes round to slap him soundly on the back. His smile is so wide Sam fears it will rip his face in half, and he seems utterly unconcerned with the gash still bleeding underneath his ribs and staining his tunic. 

“Falcon of Midgard, wielder of the Dáinsleif!”

Sam looks at the sword in his hands, frowning. “The what? What did you give me?”

Thor’s heavy arm wraps around Sam’s shoulders and squeezes. “The Dáinsleif is one of my world’s treasures, won by the Allfather from the hands of the Nidvellir Dwarf who forged it in his own daughter’s honor, before even Mjölnir was born. Its hurts never heal, and whenever it is drawn a foe must fall.”

“You — you just carry this around with you? The hammer isn’t enough?”

Thor shifts a bit, taking his arm from Sam’s shoulders and kicking at the stiff leg of the dragon with a heavily booted foot. “I may have forgotten to put it back before returning to Midgard.”

Sam’s eyes are bulged so far out of his skull he is sure they are out of their sockets altogether.

“But, I’m glad the blade has chosen a wise wielder.”

“Oh, no. You can have it back.”

“I could not wield it, Sam. The weapon has never shown itself to me in such a way. It chooses its own warrior.”

Sam looks down at his hands, brow knotted, and back up to Thor.

“...Does...does that mean you gave this to me not knowing if it would be anything more than a fancy-looking boxcutter?”

“I have the utmost faith that you could take down this beast with less than a Midgardian ‘box cutter.’”

Sam’s phone rings, but he doesn’t hear it until the fourth chime.

“If you are here to tell me there’s another one of those things I’m gonna have Static-X open up a space portal and wish you luck.” 

“Hill is sending in clean up crew. We’re all fine, thanks for asking.”

“As if your sour ass would die fighting an iguana.”

“Fuck you too, Wilson.”

“Only if you ask nice, Rogers, I’ve had a long day.”

The line clicks shut, and Sam would probably chuck his phone if Thor wasn’t still there, watching him expectantly.

Sam looks down at the sword in his hand. Feeling foolish, he carefully swings it up a bit, like how he would close a switchblade. It folds neatly back into miniature with hardly the briefest press of heat to his palm.

“You were about to eat dinner.”

He follows Thor’s line of vision to his bag, mercifully only knocked over on its side, half hidden under a nearby bench. Tucking the knife in his jeans pocket, he studies the expression in Thor’s profile. Sam might call it shy. 

“I bet they don’t have Dinosaur on Jupiter, or wherever.” Sam grabs the bag and plops down on the curb, patting the space next to him. “Have you eaten?”

The line of their shoulders brush as Thor sits down next to him and they dig into Sam’s dinner wordlessly — a little smooshed, not as warm as he’d like it to be, but still good. 

Suits come not ten minutes later, filing out of unmarked vans and prying the carcass with instruments both scientific and otherwise. Thor looks up at Sam briefly before rolling the last salt potato over to him with his fork. 

“I am not as good with swordsmanship as my mother was,” Thor says finally. “But if you...ever want to practice, I would try my best.”

The sun is orange and makes the edges of everything in Sam’s vision a bit hazy. He is grinning despite his tight-feeling chest as Thor starts scrolling through the playlists on Sam’s phone. They don’t have headphones, but Thor sets the phone down gingerly between them on the cushion of the crumpled paper bag and they listen until all the suits are gone and the moon is out. 

* * *

 

Natasha hates losing. She hates _ looking _ like she hates losing even worse. Sam can hardly keep from crowing as he accepts the little stack of thin, pastel papers from her manicured hands. Someone has to keep her humble.

“Thank you for your patronage, Ms. Romanoff.” 

“You’re going to hit my hotels soon, Samuel Thomas Wilson, and I will bankrupt you.”

He rolls the dice, humming happily, and collects his reward for passing Go. 

“You know who you look like?” She asks suddenly, a feral grin on her face. “A certain Thunder-God who came to the complex last week, talking something about Dinosaur Barbecue and A Tribe Called Quest. Tony said JARVIS had to ask him twice to turn it down in the middle of the night.”

“A who about what now?” He shoots back breezily. Dáinsleif is a weight in his pocket he’s only just getting used to. He feels a bit silly carrying it around, but it’s not really the type of thing he can leave in his catch-all drawer at home.

Thor liked his recommendation, that’s good. Sam doesn’t know many people who would find fault in  _ The Low End Theory _ , so he won’t take too much credit, but still. Sam likes helping out. It’s the only reason he feels a warm openness creak open in his chest. 

Nat flicks his top hat token across the board. “Don’t. I’m not Steve.”

“No, he’d have flipped the board over by now if he were losing as badly as you.”

“This is a capitalist’s game,” she sniffs. “I am  _ Russian _ .”

She hits Community Chest on her turn, and has to pay a fine. He sails right by her hotels and whistles between the gap in his front teeth as she hits another one of his properties and has to pay him half of her remaining stack of cash.

“You know Dr. Foster broke it off with him months ago.”

Sam gets a papercut counting out his money to buy another house on Kentucky Avenue. He wins the game, but Natasha is the one who’s smiling as they put everything back in the box and the pizza arrives. 

* * *

“Bruce, buddy, I need a solid.”

“Sam?”

“Yeah. Nat gave me your personal number, that okay?”

Sam flips open a non-Dáinsleif knife and starts to clean around his nail beds. He and Clint have landed themselves in Bolivia, looking for a blackmarket on stolen and repurposed Chitauri weapons. While fruitless, the trip was not as bad as it could have been, given his recent luck. Currently, both of them rest in quiet hammocks on the shore of Lake Titicaca, waiting for their ride home. Occasionally Sam will hear a snatch of music from a passing boat, but largely it’s just the sound of wind and water and the smell of the sun, hot on the earth. Several yards away, Clint’s hammock is up further than Sam would have dared, because Clint walked around with a perpetual deathwish like he dared something like a hammock strung on a new, green branch to be the thing that takes him out. But he was in a hammock far from Sam for whatever reason, and Sam had seen Clint turn his hearing aids off a few minutes prior anyway, and it makes him brave enough to call. 

Bruce clears his throat. “Oh — I. Of course it’s fine. I’m just surprised. What can I do for you? Are you alright?”

“Yeah man. You good?”

“I — yes?”

He nicks his finger with the knife and puts it away, grimacing. He just needs to get to it.

“Look, I don’t know how to ask you this. Do you have the big guy’s number?”

Bruce pauses long enough Sam thinks maybe the call dropped. “Is this a joke?”

“No, man, you’re the only one I know who won’t be an ass about it. I haven’t — we’ve been  _ out of touch  _ since those damn lizards and he gave me a gift but I hate writing thank you cards, I don’t actually think this is the type of thing I could write a thank you card for,  so I wanted to,” he makes himself stop babbling and takes a deep breath. “Look, if you don’t want to give it to me, I get it, y’all are friends. I didn’t mean anything sideways. Forget I asked.”

“You mean  _ Thor _ .”

“What the hell else other ‘big guy’ could I possibly mean?”

There is a very long silence on the phone. Sam blames  _ everything _ on the heat and dehydration.

“...Oh.”

Bruce is maybe chuckling, maybe crying, on the other line. 

“I’ll send it to you, alright? Just...take care of yourself, Sam.”

Sam sinks into the springy give of his hammock. Now Bruce Banner was worried about his well-being. Wasn’t that rich?

He stares at the shared contact info when it lights up his screen a few minutes later, but can’t make himself do anything but shove the phone back in his pants pocket. Clint is snoring in his hammock, and while Sam doesn’t sink that deep, he tries to doze at least a little until the quinjet comes. 

* * *

Sam is jetlagged the next day more than he would normally be, considering Nat and Clint, the little shits they were, took a detour to the  _ Philippines _ while he was asleep to get lechón for dinner and didn’t even save him any before bringing them back to New York. It’s all the excuse he needs not to call.


	2. 02.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 24:21  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/02.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Two**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/02.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**02.** _

Jane Foster is pretty by way of waifishness and good genes rather than grooming. She has bits of strawberry poptart stuck in her long, fine hair that Sam can smell as she leans far too close to look him over in the third floor hall of the complex. It is only part of the reason he leans away from her scrutiny, something hot and uncomfortable twisting in his belly. He has still not opened the text from Bruce with Thor’s number, two weeks after asking for it.

“Something I can help you with, Dr. Foster?”

“I need you in the lab.”

Sam nearly stumbles a bit. “Uh, pass.”

Her bony fingers are iron and implacable around his bicep as she drags him forward.

“Dr. Foster, I do have other things on my plate, so —”

“Ground rules. Don’t look at Darcy, don’t talk to Darcy, I’ve only just gotten her calmed down after Thor told her what you said about the Backstreet Boys —”

“Sounds like I should just _not go_.”

She looks over her shoulder to give him a remarkably clear eyed glare.

“ _Bruce_ asked for you.”

He shakes his arm free, frowning.

“Great, I’ll give _Bruce_ a call, so you can keep your hands to yourself. I really do have someplace to be.”

“But —”

_But nothing_ , Sam grumbles to himself, turning on his heel and walking to conference room four. Tony is glaring at him before the door is even open.

“I am even less in the mood than usual for your shit, Stark.”

“Forgive me, Wilson, for being concerned you’d be late for a meeting with the Secretary of State.”

Sam flops down in the closest available chair. It rolls backwards and bumps Wanda’s. She’s playing Crossy Road under the table, unbothered by the scene around her. He misses being a teenager.

“Why don’t you try that ‘giving a damn’ act with Secretary Kelly, instead of wasting it on my ass, who you _know_ won’t believe you.”

Tony’s got his mouth open for another quip that will waste Sam’s time and shave years off his life when the door opens again, Thor and Barnes strolling through. Barnes has his hands in his pockets, and even though he is looking forward there is a looseness to his mouth like he might be enjoying Thor’s company, who beside him is smiling broadly, dressed in a pair of grey sweatpants and a t-shirt so tight it’s stretched sheer, wholly inappropriate for meeting a member of the President’s Cabinet.

Sam hates his job.

When Barnes tries to take the seat next to him, Sam kicks at the wheels so he nearly stumbles out of it.

“What the hell was that for, Chicken Little?”

He does not have a very good answer, so he levels Barnes with his coolest glare. “Just wanted to do my part to keep you agile, old man. Regular exercise is good for the aging joints _and_ the aging mind.”

“Sam!”

Wanda squawks as the sweeping hug Thor wraps him in pushes her chair forward, ramming her ribs into the table. She is glaring at them both as she pushes up from her seat and stomps to take a seat next to Tony.

Sam returns his hug the best he’s able, largely occupied with giving Barnes the middle finger where he can see the cyborg smirking at him like he _knows something_ over Thor’s massive shoulder, when Sam knows for a _fact_ that Barnes knows absolutely _nothing_ about _anything._

“Good to see you too buddy. Hey, remember that chat we had about how many lungs I have?”

Thor releases him so quickly Sam falls back in his chair, nearly winded.

“Forgive me. I was just...happy to see you.”

Sam is already reaching out to grab Thor’s wrist when he stops himself, suddenly aware of the heavy, watchful silence around them.

“You too, man. Just, your biceps are gonna beat my lungs every time, you know?”

Thor looks down at his hands before clasping them behind his back, clearing his throat. “Of course. I’ll remember next time.” He looks around the room with a small, tight smile before very gingerly taking Wanda’s abandoned seat.

There was a misstep there, but the room is watching them in a way that sets Sam’s teeth on edge, like they are expecting something. He turns away from Thor to face Tony at the front of the room. He raises an eyebrow coolly.

“Did you make up this meeting just to force us to spend time with you, Tin Can?”

Barnes frowns at Sam in his periphery. Tony raises his hands in surrender. “Easy, tiger.”

Pepper knocks perfunctorily before opening the glass door for Secretary Kelly. Both of their heels clack in unnerving unison as they sit down at the table and Sam is saved from answering that.

_Thank you, God, and thank you, Pepper Potts._

“I am in the Adirondacks, enjoying a nice and much needed vacation with my family,” Secretary Kelly begins crisply, before she’s even fully seated. Sam sinks down into his own chair. If she doesn’t have permission to be here, there is no way this ends well. “I have alibis and sworn statements about this already. I beseech you not to test me. I will make the Accords look lenient if you do.”

She looks over all of them. If her eyes catch on Thor, flick down to his shirt, Sam reminds himself it is not his business and keeps his gaze straight above Wanda’s head.    

“I was under the impression Captain Rogers would be joining us.”

Barnes snorts beside him, and Tony leans back to prop his feet on the polished table, one hand pinching his brow. Pepper looks close to developing laser eyes to slice her husband in half.

“You asked for Captain America, to be clear.”

Secretary Kelly’s hair was auburn once, but now glints steely in the sunlight from the long windows lining the wall opposite the door. Her expression is equally flinty when she levels it at Tony, straightening the pressed charcoal cuffs on her suit jacket.

“Mr. Stark, I know you played games like this with General Ross, but I am not the one to test.”

“Lady, Captain America is already _here_.” Barnes jerks his thumb to Sam, who looks blankly back at her. He is careful to not so much as blink when he speaks.

“That gonna be a problem?”

Sam watches her visibly chew the inside of her cheek. “Rogers has made it clear, running around as he has, that he is _not_ retired. Is the Captain injured? Are you his temporary replacement?”

Suddenly Thor is leaning forward beside him, his massive elbows creaking on the table, hands clasped close to his mouth. There is only the gravel of serious intent and none of his usual joy when he speaks.

“There is no better man or warrior to hold the shield of your country than Sam Wilson. Steven would agree, if he were here. Not that you should need his approval to recognize the debt you already owe this man.”

Sam’s stomach is in his throat, which is dumb. He knows he’s _good_ , and being Captain America is _good_ , but Thor doesn’t even really know him well enough to defend Sam like that. But Thor is a good man and a good friend, despite Sam basically ghosting him after Lizard-Gate.

“I am not questioning Mr. Wilson’s qualifications —”

“Steve didn’t come because he thinks you’re full of shit. You should be glad any of us are here,” Barnes snaps.

Secretary Kelly is no punk, but there is a rightful, instinctive fear that people with no practice being around Barnes have that tightens the corners of her mouth, her pupils wide and black.

She finally clears her throat, looking down at the table.

“You are correct, Sergeant Barnes. If you still like to be called that? I understand you don’t feel much like yourself, anymore. Still, forgive me for assuming the fate of the world would mean more than a petty grudge, especially considering all the U.S. government has done for the Captain.”

Barnes leans forward, quick as a blink, but Sam grabs his knee under the table. Across from them, he sees Tony sit up and wrap an arm around the back of Wanda’s chair, his fingers tapping lightly over her shoulder like nurses do when they stick you with the other hand.

Nonplussed, Kelly reaches into her briefcase and digs out five pieces of paper, which get passed around to each of them.

“These come back with me. Tilda Johnson has escaped her holding facility in Newark and has negotiated immunity with Latveria. She’s en route now; if she makes it inside their borders we will be unable to legally extradite her.”

“Nightshade,” Wanda hums, scanning over the sheet. “That’s a good name, for once.”

“She’s got cybernetic and biological expertise that I shouldn’t have to tell you will mean bad news for everyone when she hooks her wagon to Victor von Doom. She was serving time for illegally operating on inmates during her stint as a prison doctor, fitting them with...tools of compliance. Most of her experiments even worked. She covered her tracks well enough no one noticed until Mr. Tzing Jao, one of her accomplices, took a plea deal for a separate charge. It was only after that we noticed her embezzlement activities.”

Sam clears his throat. “You are asking us to do this under the table for a reason.”

“I just gave you a damn good one, _Captain America._ ”

Barnes and Thor bristle on either side of him, and however he feels about that will have to wait until later. He looks at Tilda’s picture on the paper in front of him; a delicate but square jaw, thick, curly hair piled on top of her head and bright eyes that seem alive even printed flat like this, hyperaware even in CMYK.

He leans back in his seat. “I didn’t have to serve as long as I did to smell bullshit.”

“And for the record,” Tony butts in, as he is prone to doing, “Paper handouts are not allowed in any of my buildings. I didn’t put billions of dollars of StarkTech in this building for you to insult me with a hard copy, what is this, the dark ages?” He scoffs, flipping the paper facedown on the table, where FRIDAY scans it into the Avengers databank. “And think about the environment.”

“After she broke containment she stole a piece of tech from Meachum-Rand,” Kelly grinds out, looking determinedly away from Tony.

Thor leans close, his breath warm at the shell of Sam’s ear. “Will you explain that to me?”

Kelly keeps on like she heard him, which she likely did, as Thor’s whisper was somewhere between a “church” and “regular inside” voice. “It’s circuitry that gives her, and soon,  Victor von Doom, easy access to any computer in the world; it can override any access code on any system.”

Beside him, Barnes is folding his paper into an airplane.

Kelly sighs, smoothing a hand over her stiffly hairsprayed french twist and looking utterly harassed.

“Ward Meachum refuses to admit this tech has been stolen, which means, officially, this is none of our business. If he would fess up to it, we could make a case to send in one of our own teams as a national security issue. But we don’t, so I am stuck here, asking you.”

Sam leans forward on his elbows and rubs a hand over his face. “Who do you think you are lying to, exactly? ‘Need a reason,’ my ass. I know how SF ops work.”

She slams her hand flat on the table. It’s Pepper who clears her throat, looking pointedly up from her tablet and between Kelly’s hand and her ashen face. The Secretary just sneers at her.

“After General Ross’ gross ineptitude was made irreparably public, many members...associated with that office have taken a highly conservative stance regarding starting new operations as well as current official U.S. involvement abroad.”

“You believe this woman is enough of a threat to commit treason?”

She eyes Thor shrewdly, twisting the simple wedding band on her finger for a long minute.

“Do I strike you as someone who makes impulsive decisions, Odinson?”

“You strike me as a great many things,” Thor offers smoothly, with a little shrug. “Chief among them the type of woman to reward a straightforward question with a straightforward answer.”

Wanda tries to hide her grin behind her hand, but Sam catches the Secretary seeing it.

“I care about the safety of this country and the people in it — the _world_ , and the people in it — more than any job. I recall you having made a similar decision, once, if SHIELD intel was ever worth more than HYDRA horseshit.”

Thor concedes with a dip of his head Sam will forever deny being gracious bordering on princely. He is smiling a bit like things are settled, and not at all like they are actively going to shit, which is in fact what’s actually happening.

Barnes sighs when Sam catches his eye, his arms crossed over his chest. His metal wrist catches the light and reflects off Tony’s glasses.

“If you want to do it, I’ll go. I _guess_ ,” he says flatly. Sam looks around the table for assent before turning in his chair to face Kelly.

“We’re gonna need a few hours to prep and get airborne without eyes on us, but we’ll do it. You’ll owe us some favors.”

* * *

Pepper walks Kelly to the door, after, but doesn’t show her out of the facility. It’s Darcy Lewis that leans against the wall opposite, typing furiously on her phone and hardly looking up as the door opens.

“Let me show you out,” she offers without looking up. Sam has the feeling he and Darcy aren’t on good terms right now, but her apparent disinterest makes the Secretary stiffen, her upper lip a distasteful curl, and Sam is glad to see it.

He watches Kelly follow Darcy, still looking down at her phone, through the glass door as Pepper takes a seat back at the table.

“Look. We didn’t have an option but to accept her meeting, but I don’t need to tell you why this is a bad idea, Tony. You signed the Accords, if you get caught doing this there is no way, none, that you recover, PR wise. _Legal_ wise.” She leans forward to better look at Wanda. “And you know they are chomping at the bit for any reason to detain you or worse.”

Wanda frowns. “This woman is dangerous. How can I not go?”

“Yeah, Pep,” Tony echoes, eyes comically wide. “How can we not go?”

She kicks him under the table.

“You are trying to get out of that commencement speech, don’t bullshit me!” She hisses.

“Look,” Sam tries to reason, because he owes Pepper anyway, “we need to take as few people as possible, and frankly, there is no such thing as incognito Iron Man suit. Maybe you staying behind isn’t a bad idea.”

Tony scoffs. “Are you grounding me?”

“Unless you have an invisible plane stashed up your ass, then yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing.”

“Doesn’t feel good, does it?” Wanda asks smugly.

Tony gapes at her. “If I can’t go, _you_ can’t go!”

“Johnson is heading towards Sokovia — what used to be Sokovia — to get to Latveria, which Wanda still knows better than anyone else here. And she’s is the only one who can do magic even close to Doom’s level, so she’ll be _much_ more helpful than you...as usual,”  Bucky points out, not even trying to hide his smirk.

“Barnes, I made you a new arm!”

“You were the reason I needed it in the first place,” he snaps. “Besides, _Shuri_ made me a new arm. Your clunker model is still in its box in my room.”

“This is _unbelievable_ ,” Tony seethes. “Why do I even accept these commencement invitations?” He points an accusatory finger to Barnes across the table. “And why do I even try to be nice to you? Why?”

“Steve,” the five of them say in unison.

His mouth opens and closes wordlessly before he rounds on Thor. “And what’s your excuse to go then, Big Guy? No way the walking Led Zeppelin show is somehow more _incognito_ than my suit.”

Sam rises from the table, straightening his shirt. “Thunderstorms can happen anywhere, if your MIT degrees didn’t cover that. Everyone that is _not_ Tony, get your shit together, I’ll meet you in the hangar in two hours.”

“Conceivably, there are places where thunderstorms are unlikely or don’t —”

“Thank you, Sam,” Pepper sighs, rolling her chair close to Tony and putting her hand over his mouth.

Sam is pretty sure Thor and Barnes both try to catch him on his way out, but Sam is only thinking about avoiding Dr. Foster and her science minions as he stalks up to his seldom-used quarters, making the biggest grilled cheese he can manage, and taking a very, very long nap.

* * *

He is only half awake as he packs his bag, and it is for that reason — and that reason _only_ — that he starts like a spooked cat seeing Steve leaning up against the doorway to his bedroom.

“Thought you were still ambling around Midtown looking at retirement homes.”

“If you want me to go, I will. Just ask.”

Sam looks up at him, lips pressed together in a flat line. “I’ll take care of your boyfriend. Don’t worry about it.”

Steve nudges his bag out of the way to sit on Sam’s bed, leaning back on his elbows. “I know you will. Not too worried about Buck.”

“I’ve got someplace to be, so now’s not really the time for you to suddenly develop a sense of tact. If you’ve got something to say, just say it.”

“You’ve just been acting cagey, Sam.” He visibly tamps down a smile. “Natasha seems to think maybe you need — I think her words were ‘male bonding,’ but I can’t be sure in what context —”

Sam flinches reflexively. “No. _No_. No. Not doing it. Not having this conversation right now.”

“Come on, Sam. You would tell _me_ to talk about it.”

“Do as I say, not as I do.”

Steve doesn’t bother to rise from his sprawl on Sam’s bed as Sam continues to pack, double checking his first aid kit, his toothbrush, his underwear.

“I was sparring with Thor the other day and he mentioned you got a gift?”

“Steve, really. I’m not in the mood.”

“No, you really.” Steve sits up, and his face is serious enough Sam stops to look at him fully. “He seemed to be under the impression it offended you. Thought you might want to rectify that.”

“Offended me?”

“You should talk to him about it,” Steve offers innocently, having the gall to shrug his big shoulders. “He even found me in the hall this afternoon, asking _again_ if he had done something wrong by you.”

“Whatever you’re thinking that is making you smile like that, you’re wrong.”

“I thought Wanda was the mind reader around here.”

Sam gives up on packing and collapses next to Steve in defeat, running his hand over his face.

“I don’t know, man. I don’t know what you want from me, here. I don’t know what he wants, either.”

Steve lays back so their shoulders are pressed together. “You don’t know what _you_ want.”

Sam doesn’t answer. Of course he knows what he wants —

“You’re a steady guy, Sam. I don’t think anyone’s made you sweat in a while. It’s good for you.”

“You...are an asshole.”

There is a knock on his apartment’s door. Steve turns his head to look at him, grinning serenely.

“Looks like you’re needed somewhere, Captain America.”

“I hate you,” Sam grumbles, rolling up off the bed and slinging his half packed bag over his shoulder. Outside of his door, Wanda absently braids her wavy hair over her shoulder. Barnes stares at him blankly, like he’s back in cryo.

“I’ll see you later, you little shit!” He calls, not breaking eye contact with Sam.

“Try not to die, punk!” Steve hollers back, apparently content to stay in Sam’s rooms as he clicks the door closed behind him.

Sam resolutely ignores the budding headache throbbing like an icepick at his temples, budding between his brows. “Let’s get this over with.”

* * *

They take the smallest quinjet in the hangar just as the sun is setting pink and soft as taffy, low enough to brush the lush green treetops surrounding the complex. Barnes and Wanda settle in the back, shoulder to shoulder and passing Wanda’s phone between them as they take turns playing Doodle Jump. Sam sits up front, double checking the controls and the new radar monitor Tony had installed in the dash. He switches idly between channels until he sees Thor stride into the hangar through the jet’s big front window, dressed in the same entirely unfair sweatpants from earlier. One of his hands holds a well worn black duffle, the other idly swinging Mjölnir so the muscles and veins in his forearm and bicep swell to life and roll deliciously under his golden skin.

Sam sighs and makes himself walk out of the cockpit. Thor is putting Mjölnir and his bag down across from Bucky and Wanda with almost comic gentleness when Sam makes it to the back and catches Thor’s eye.

“I need some playlist assistance,” he begins slowly, unsure of what else to say or how else to start. “Can you offer a friend a hand?”

Thor’s smile is tentative, maybe, and he stops himself from touching Sam midway through reaching out, but he follows Sam up to the front. Wanda and Barnes’ eyes bore holes in their backs when they go, which is probably something Sam should have expected, but doesn’t help him any as he tries to find words to apologize without sounding presumptuous.

“If I made you uncomfortable, Sam, I want to apologize.”

Sam nearly stumbles into his chair, groaning.

“No, man, I wanted to apologize to you. Don’t beat me to it.”

Thor raises a hand as he settles into the seat next to Sam. “I’ve given it some thought. I felt like perhaps I made you uncomfortable, thinking you had to accept Dáinsleif if you truly didn’t want to. I called you the Falcon, before I knew you had taken the shield. I thought perhaps this offended you. Then I — then I thought perhaps it was just me. So I want to make it clear that I,” he clears his throat and pulls his phone out, pulling up the playlists Sam helped him make. “I am not — wanting anything from you but your company and your friendship, should you find me worthy of your time, Sam. I don’t want anything else.”

The sky is silky ink seeping navy into orange, striped with the bleached puffs of clouds still trapping the dying sunlight, and inside the hangar, inside the cockpit, it is very quiet. Dáinsleif is heavy in his back pocket, his phone is heavy in his front, and his talk with Steve and everything he didn’t say is heavy on his tongue, hard to push down, but Sam is used to hard.

This is — easier, isn’t it? Better. Sam shakes himself where he was sinking back into his chair. This was better. Thor gave him a gift, just there, by speaking before Sam made an ass of himself. Before Sam had allowed himself to really _want_. He forces himself to grin.

“Yeah, man. I was just going to say the same thing. I’ve been stressed out lately — that big steak knife took me off guard, but I didn’t mean to take it out on you.” He sticks his hand out. “Friends. We can...we can definitely do that.”


	3. 03.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 24:21  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/03.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Three**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/03.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**03.** _

Tony Stark hacks the quinjet’s controls and starts flying it remotely not three hours into their flight.

“This is your actual captain speaking.”

“Oh fuck  _ off _ ,” Sam groans above the lip of his coffee mug. He’s only two sips in, and Tony Stark has already found a way to ruin what is so far the only good thing about this gig from thousands of miles away and without even being physically present. 

“Here I am trying to gift you a few hours  _ reprieve _ — a gift, Birdy-Boy, though I know you have some trouble accepting those, apparently — trying to give you time to  _ nap _ , maybe even time to be the  _ little spoon  _ —” 

Snarling, Sam reaches over and turns the radio volume knob down so hard it nearly snaps off. 

Tony’s voice is back again with hardly a pause.   
“That was, like, super rude, by the way. I get it, you like to big spoon, I’m not one to judge —”

“Tony, I will call Rhodey.”

“You ground me and then threaten to call my mom?”

Sam leans back in his seat, pinching the bridge of his nose and grateful he’s alone up front. Thor had left an hour into Rakim’s discography after Wanda had peeked her head into the cockpit and asked if Thor might want to race the plane with her while Bucky was audibly snoring in the back.

He’d agreed, and Sam suspected he let her win at least once from what he could see from the window.  It worked out for Sam, too. The picture she snapped of Comrade Popsicle snoring was now Barnes’ contact photo on Sam’s phone. Steve had sent him rows of incoherent emojis when Sam forwarded it to their group chat. 

Sam watches Wanda do a very graceful figure eight outside, trailing red behind her. He looks back down at the radio thoughtfully. 

“You’re right. Rhodey has suffered enough.”

There is a surprising beat of silence. 

“I apologized to you. I remember that. When you came back.”

Sam looks at the dashboard like an oracle. “...What are you talking about?”

“When you and Barnes came back to the complex, I said I was sorry for — what happened with the Accords. What I did. When Steve came back I said it to him, too. Not that it matters, I’m still bending over my ass to prove it to him. But...if that’s what this was about, earlier —”

“That was a surprisingly passable attempt at emotional literacy.”

“Pep says I’m learning.” Stark’s tinny voice is tight and flat over the comms. 

“You’ve always been an ass, Stark. I’ve learned to not get hung up about it. You didn’t need to come, that’s all. Don’t pout.”

It is quiet while Sam makes it halfway through his coffee mug.

“Cap, I really have it. Get some rest while you can.”

The GPS has them four hours away from their landing in Liberec, where they would head east into Sokovia — another five hours, at least, at his most optimistic approximation. He could objectively use the rest, since he doubts he’ll be sleeping more than thirty minutes at a time for however long it takes to track Johnson down. From her impressive but suspiciously slim dossier, the woman wouldn’t give them an easy chase.

“How much coffee have you had, Foil Hat?”

Tony snorts. “I won’t fall asleep at the wheel. Get some shut eye.”

Sam finishes his coffee before he heads back, enjoying what are undoubtedly the last dregs of quiet he would get for a while. Tony can’t let him have more than five minutes of it before his voice is back over the speaker.

“This won’t help me get back in Rogers’ good graces —”

Sam snorts. “He doesn’t have those.”

“— but you’re better at this than he is. You aren’t like talking to a brick wall, at least. It suits you. The shield.”

Sam feels something foreign in his throat, syrupy and tight, and doesn’t answer as he exits the cockpit. He makes a half aborted attempt at stretching out on his bunk above Barnes’ for all of twelve seconds before bolting upright. He’s gone through Johnson’s file five times and is routing their seventh alternate route up from Liberec to Novi Grad when the wall in front of him starts to simmer, the back of his nose tingling with the prickle that precedes either a sneeze or Wanda’s mind juju. He hardly sees them phase through the quinjet wall, her hands clasped around Thor’s forearm, before they’re inside.

“Your control is getting better, Wanda,” he says slowly, looking back down at the map in his lap. “You and Thor should pair off when we land, maybe you two can learn from each other.”

Wanda’s brow has a little crease in it, and Sam sees her look to Bucky in the bunk underneath Sam before collapsing into her own, pulling some earbuds out of the backpack at her feet. 

Sam has plans to make. He doesn’t have time to think about it.

* * *

Liberec greets them grey, rainy, and unseasonably cold. Thunder and looming nightfall are heavy above them as they collect their things to exit the small hangar owned by one of Tony’s shell companies and surrender themselves to their goosechase. Its gloomy promise is thick in the air and implacable in Sam’s lungs as he steps out of the recycled air in the jet.

“Is this you?”

Thor is smiling when he looks down at Wanda, nudging her shoulder with his massive elbow. Like this, Sam can see his arm is as big around as Wanda’s lithe middle. 

“I was going to ask you that, my lady.”

Sam only doesn’t startle when Barnes appears at his shoulder seemingly from midair, by lots of practice.

“It’s good it’s like this. Easier to hide. We got lucky.” 

“Only if your dumb ass packed a rain jacket, it would be a shame for you to rust —” 

Sam cuts himself off, mouth agape. Barnes has a massive, distinctly visible rifle slung over his right shoulder, his and Wanda’s backpacks hooked on his left.

“Hey Popsicle Soviet, that piece may not have raised any eyebrows in the _ USSR _ —”

“This is an  _ American gun _ , where exactly would it have fit?”

“Get rid of it, Barnes.”

Barnes just sneers at him. “Wanda is gonna hide it. Kiss my ass.”

“I told him I would try,” Wanda says quickly when Sam rounds on her, balking. “I also told him to bring his smaller guns. We are being careful.”

Thor claps her on the back, the noise echoing in the dim hangar like a shot.

“Of course she can conceal your weapon, James. Just in the time I’ve been back Wanda has grown tremendously with her gifts. Sam, don’t make such a face.”

Sam takes a very deep breath.

“Barnes, lose it. Wanda, I know you’ve been working hard —”

“Samuel,” Thor frowns, looking more crestfallen than Wanda, “where is the faith in your friends?”

“— but you understand why we can’t risk it,” Sam finishes firmly. He turns away before he can see Wanda’s expression crumple, but not fast enough to miss Thor’s heavy, disapproving frown.

Barnes is back before Sam really knows he’s gone.

“If I die,” he sniffs, the melodramatic little shit he is, “it’s because you wouldn’t let me take that.”

“If you die, it’s because you wanted to prove a point to me. Don’t think I’ll leave that out of your eulogy.”

“That’s fair, James.”

Barnes tries to glare at Wanda, who is making a remarkable effort to smile. But there is not much softness left in him, and no small part of it is sanctioned for Wanda. His glare reads mostly as GI distress.

She shrugs off his weak reproach, trying for bravado. “You’re a stubborn old man, am I supposed to deny that?”

“Why is the old man carrying both our bags, then?”

Sam claps his hands together. Thor’s silence is a stony weight Sam can’t shake. 

“Right. Do we need to go over the plan again?”

“ _ No _ .” 

Sam glares at Barnes and Wanda both. He’s glad they are friends, sometimes. Not right now. 

“If you are late to our meeting place, I will leave you. We know our pairs, so let’s get going so we can get home.” 

Barnes slings his arm over Wanda’s shoulder, and Sam’s stomach drops

“Wanda and I actually have a DoodleJump game going. We’ll meet you at the getaway car.”

“No one even says that anymore, James,” Wanda sighs.

“Throwing the plan to the wind before we’re even out of the jet is a record even for you, Barnes.” 

Wanda is looking determinedly at her feet, but Barnes is smirking at him. “Plans aren’t worth shit if they don’t still work after you break them. This way you and Thor can do that touristy shit —”

“ _ We’re here to catch a terrorist _ .”

“So we better get moving, Cap.  Come on, Wanda, the google said we have to try garlic soup.”

“We aren’t here to eat!” Sam calls, but they are already walking away, Wanda tossing the hood of her sweatshirt up, Barnes shoving on a baseball cap.

“If you’d prefer we didn’t — I have the map memorized. We can go separately, if you would like,” Thor says stiffly, barely shifting his weight on his feet. 

Sam nearly bites his lips off. “I didn’t mean it like that.” He adjusts his backpack — the wings have left his back scarred and calloused, but today he feels the dig through the bag like the nerves there aren’t fried from overuse. “Let’s just get going.”

If Barnes decided to stick to any part of the plan, he and Wanda would be sweeping Liberec’s southern city limits, so he and Thor start trekking north in mildly awkward silence. The path from the hangar down to the closest main road is a steep downwards march that drags on longer than it has any right to. Their descent is punctuated by fat raindrops that splat like anvils on his boots, only to reconsider and stutter to a stop as erratic as their start. 

He can only take five minutes before he feels like he’s going to crawl out of his skin.

“I know you think I made the wrong call back there.”

“It was yours to make.” Thor weighs each word, stretching it out to its fullest capacity.

“Wanda gets nervous in the moment, she doubts herself and it makes her fail. She still hasn’t learned to perform under pressure, and I can’t risk that for Barnes’ stubborn ass.”

“If you never give her the chance to be better,” Thor hums, “what do you expect?”

Sam huffs, hiking his bag up on his shoulders. There are lights starting to pepper the buildings coming into view.

“I expect her to practice, and to understand and accept my decision even if she doesn’t agree, because that’s what she signed up for.”

Thor’s silence beside him says enough as they cross into a market square. String lights in all shapes and colors are criss-crossed from the stalls, even going up the cobblestone street that ascends in a steep hill from the market below. Despite the rain, there is a sizeable crowd milling about, audible from several blocks away. Thor had put on a sweatshirt before leaving the jet, and with his newly shorn hair he doesn’t look immediately recognizable to a passing glance, but the promise of the bustling market makes Sam wish they had taken further precaution against being seen.

“She is still a kid,” Sam says after a moment, inexplicably still needing to explain himself. “You can help her with that magic stuff, she and Barnes can act out whatever pseudo-brother-sister shit they project onto each other, Tony and Clint can coddle her, but I didn’t get asked to come here to use this op as her playroom. You may not believe this, but after everything in Lagos, Barnes and I were the ones that pushed her to get back in. For her sake, I won’t let her mess up like that again.”

The smell of fried flatbreads dusted in fat, glistening crystals of salt, sugary spit-cakes filled with strawberry jam, and savory grilled sausages is heavy around them over the yeasty smell of split, warm beer as they step into the light and noise of the square proper. 

Thor still hasn’t answered him. If it were Steve or Barnes or even  _ Clint  _ beside him, silent, Sam would weep with gratitude. But they have at least eight hours ahead of them to Novi Grad, and Sam won’t be miserable through it.

“Look, do you want a beer?”

Thor raises his eyebrows, but is closer to smiling than when they left the hangar. Sam will take it. 

“I thought we weren’t here to eat, Captain.”  
“We can drink and walk, if you don’t tell Barnes.”

Sam hands the man behind the closest stall a few bills and points to the middle tap with two fingers and no real clue as to the difference between any of them. 

It’s a golden pilsner, which Sam maybe should have expected, and both the plastic cups he takes from the smiling owner are nearly more foam than liquid. Sam downs a third of his in a big gulp.

“...Would you like mine as well, friend? If you’re — ah — that thirsty.”

Sam waves him off, still mid drink. 

“‘M not thirsty,” he half gasps when finally releasing the rim of his cup. 

Thor takes a sip of his own beer, white froth bubbling at his moustache. He licks it away thoughtlessly. Sam has to take another drink.

He hates his job.

“I don’t want you to feel like you have to explain yourself to me,” Thor says finally, when they are nearly out of the square. “I know we don’t — aren’t familiar like you are with Steven, or James. But I trust you to lead. I hope that doesn’t mean I can’t...offer my thoughts.”

There is an inexplicable fleck of glitter underneath Thor’s left eye. Sam focuses on that, and only that. 

“I appreciate that. And I hear you about Wanda. I do.”

It is quiet but blessedly more comfortable as they start the walk up the steep hill out from the market. Sam’s stomach rumbles, and he nearly doubles back for one of the sausages, or at least a piece of the flatbread.

At the top of the hill, two men argue underneath the open hood of an old, mustard yellow Ford Pinto (Sam has to take a moment, he didn’t know any of those cars existed anywhere on planet Earth anymore). Oil smears their sweaty forearms, their shining foreheads. Their rapid Czech is carried on the cool, wet breeze still only promising real rain, still smelling of oil and salt from the market, the fresh jerkys and hung meats from the stalls fully behind them now, and it is all the warning they get before the car starts to roll backwards down the hill. 

A woman is walking her child across the street a few feet in front of them, grocery bags in the hand not clutching her son’s, who hums cheerily, wearing comically bright red galoshes. Her phone is tucked between her ear and shoulder as she laughs into it.

Sam drops his cup and rushes for them headlong. He all but barrels them over, clutching the boy to his chest as he pushes the mother out of the way for an impact that never comes.

Bewildered, he looks up from the squirming child and their blubbering mother, pulling at his arm, to see Thor a few yards up the hill, smiling widely at the two men with one hand pressed to the car’s bumper and keeping it still. 

His stomach is leaden ice. The men have their phones out, yammering incoherently. It’s all Sam can do to not punt the kid away from his physical person. He can’t get up the hill fast enough, his thighs a low burn as he tries to angle himself between Thor and the flashing pops of their phone cameras. 

“Put the goddamn car down.”

The men are trying to bargain with him in rapid Czech as Sam tries to nudge Thor into some sort of action, not that it makes a damn. 

“Sam, Sam. It’s alright. We’ll be on our way once I return this to its rightful —” 

Sam slams his foot down on top of Thor’s hard enough to fracture the little bones there, on a normal person. He doubts it would be so easy to hurt Thor like that, but he stops talking, so Sam comforts himself that he at least feels it a little.

“I said we need to  _ leave _ .”

Thor looks down the bridge of his nose at him before bending forward, purposefully slow, to grab at the car with both hands and walk it back to its former perch. His ears are a violent shade of red, red as the splotches framing Sam’s vision.

Sam takes as much of Thor’s bicep in his hand as he can manage, dragging him away from the growing crowd in the street. He knows Thor is only letting himself be moved, and it sets Sam’s skin too tight to his body.

“The whole reason we came through Liberec in the  _ first place _ ,” he grunts, releasing Thor as they make a sharp left to an alley branching off from the road’s main stretch, “was to avoid drawing as much attention to ourselves. Doom has more LSF agents in Sokovia now than actual Sokovians, and it was going to be hard enough to cross through it and into Latveria as  _ is _ , without all of  _ this _ —”

“All  _ what _ ?”

Sam skids to stop, grinding his teeth to bitter dust on his tongue as he turns back around to face Thor.

“They know we’re coming, now, Thor. If we don’t already have a tail I’ll be surprised.”

His phone dings in his pocket, the sudden noise shattering the brittle, unyielding line of Sam’s spine.

Tony has sent their group chat screenshots of three separate Twitter threads. Sam can’t read Czech, but the pictures of Thor tell him enough about what they say. 

“Subtle,” Tony sends after a moment.

Natasha replies immediately, as usual. Two nose bubble emojis, followed by:

“Ya good luck w that, amateur hour.”

Sam grips the phone so hard his screen cracks.


	4. 04.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 16:58  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/04.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Four**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/04.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**04.** _

Thor doesn’t speak to him for ten minutes after he shoves the phone back in his pocket and stalks back into the street, a perfect time for the first pinchings of a migraine to muffle the noise of his mental rolodex as he goes through each of the alternate routes he’d mapped out earlier.

Getting discovered before making it to Latveria — before making it to  _ Sokovia  _ — wasn’t something Sam hadn’t considered. But so soon, and because Thor couldn’t not  _ show off _ feels like a sizeable wrench even in the backup plans.

It couldn’t have been Barnes that fucked up?

Sam has lead them back around the market perimeter twice, two different ways, before he pulls his phone back out. He should just get it over with. 

“What happened to sticking to the plan?” Barnes asks him casually on the second ring. It sounds like he’s talking around a mouthful of food.

“I hope you and Steve both throw you backs out next time you’re bumping uglies.”

Barnes crows on the other end of the line, and Sam takes pleasure in the little choking noise he hears as Barnes struggles to breathe around the food he probably shouldn’t even be eating. 

. “Look, we’re not gonna meet you at the first rendezvous. Go ahead without us, and we’ll just meet you at the same checkpoint into Latveria tomorrow night. We’re gonna make some circles first to lose any eyes.”

“If Johnson knows we’re sniffing around, the phones aren’t safe for long.”

Sam rolls his eyes. So nice for Barnes to remember they’re here for business.

“I have my prepaids,” he sniffs, “did you remember yours?”

Sam doesn’t waste any time after Barnes clicks off the line. He takes out his SIM card and snaps it in half before throwing the phone to the ground and crushing it under the heel of his boot.

He jerks his chin to Thor. “Lose yours, too.”

Thor toys with the phone in his hands. “If we have company,” he begins slowly, “we shouldn’t be wasting our time. The longer we walk in circles, the more opportunities they have to find us.”

Sam peels Thor’s fingers away from his phone.

“I’m pretty sure they’ve already found us after that display back there, big guy.”

“There wasn’t another way,” Thor insists, his chin jutted out.

Sam rolls his eyes as disassembles the memory on the device. He crushes Thor’s phone underfoot, kicking the pieces into a nearby sewer drain.

“There really was, And then you couldn’t just stop there, you had to show off —”

“And allow those people to be ploughed over?”

“If you thought first,” Sam’s breathing is even but shallow, “maybe you would have gone for the  _ people, _ rather than the car _. _ ”

“It appeared to  _ me _ , at the time, that you had it under control. Those men needed my help. I know your Midgardian cars are expensive, they may not have been able to replace something so valuable.”

Sam pinches the bridge of his nose. He reminds himself that other planets don’t have Ford Pintos. “I won’t argue with you about this in the middle of the street. Just — come on, it doesn’t matter now. It’s done.”

Thor doesn’t move to follow.

“Buddy, I’m trying to bury the hatchet here. Or the big-ass hammer, whatever y’all call it.”

“I still think we should head straight to —”

Sam won’t keep having this argument. He levels Thor with a cool glare. “You said I was a good warrior. You said you trusted me to lead. Is that only until I disagree with you?”

Thor steps so close Sam can count the ochre bristles of his beard, a new, aggressive defensiveness in his body Sam wants to push back against. He dips his head to speak close to Sam’s ear, and there is something patronizing in the movement that raises Sam’s hackles.

“A good warrior wouldn’t so easily discount the advice — the opinion — of a friend, no matter how confident they were in their plans.”

It’s all Sam can do to not splay his hands on Thor’s chest and push him backwards, away from Sam and out of his space.

In New York, Sam wanted the courage to speak to this man plainly. Now, he’s unsure if he has the self-control to finish this op without throttling him. Sam will deny it to God himself, but he almost wishes Barnes were here instead.

“I don’t care about being  _ confident in my plans _ , or a good warrior like in your  _ fairy tales _ ,” he grinds out. “I’m just trying to stay  _ alive _ , if you’re interested in joining me. If you aren’t, you know the map as well as I do.”

Sam won’t beg. If Thor wants to split up, he’s more than welcome to leave. But Sam will wait for him to make that decision first. 

It is a longer wait than Sam has time for. 

“...If you’re sure,” Thor grunts. Sam doesn’t dignify that with an answer.

* * *

They are followed, of course. Most of the Latverian Sovereignty Forces not stationed in Latveria itself were scattered in its immediate neighbors, but the Czech Republic was not so far that Doom wouldn’t settle a few spies, regardless of the official WSC and EU complaints they rack up.

Thirty-five minutes after destroying their phones in the alley, twenty minutes after first feeling the neck-prickling awareness of being watched, Sam winds his arm around Thor’s waist. He ignores Thor stiffening and nearly recoiling at the touch as he directs them to a grassy courtyard at the mouth of two streets in the historic district, red-bricked roofs and buttery yellow facades oddly bright even in the grey evening. A reasonable crowd gathers at the fountain of the square where a street band is playing more kinds of saxophones than Sam knew existed. Walking the streets this time of night would get them nowhere, they needed to disappear. The crowd isn’t quite big enough to manage that easily, but it will have to do.

“Sorry,” Sam mutters, when the line of Thor’s back doesn’t loosen any as they approach the noise of the crowd. “If you don’t like — I’ll let go once we get in the crowd, alright?”

Thor slings his arm over Sam’s shoulders. It pushes his backpack down so the wings dig in between his shoulders, knife sharp. Sam tries to not breathe deeply as they meander through the noise and bodies. Thor’s hand is heavy but relaxed resting over his shoulder. As they pass particularly close to one of the saxophonists, the thick fingers drum in time on Sam’s bicep. 

It is the lack of oxygen to his brain from breathing around the unyielding pressure at his back, but Sam thinks it’s relaxing, even with the lingering stiffness between them. Not as awkward as it should have been, maybe, to have their hips brushing like this, feeling the little bump of Thor’s waistband through the soft cotton of his sweatshirt like a promise. He would tuck his thumbs underneath it, if he had the time. The opportunity. Roll them down slowly, just to be an ass, and draw it out. 

“You!”   


He and Thor both stop short at the exclamation.

A stocky woman in a pair of shiny red Doc Martens, her long, fine hair poofed out from her head like her finger had been occupied by a socket until only just recently points at them, furious and attracting every pair of eyes around.

_ Shit. _

Thor pulls Sam closer. Sam’s back is a white sheet of agony.

“Forgive me, ma’am. We’re here for a private evening —”

The ground is surely opening up to swallow Sam up in its maw as Thor clearly tries his hand at incognito. As if fake dating even worked anymore.

“I don’t give a  _ shit _ about your privacy.”

That’s rude.

The girl steps close, very nearly brave enough to poke Thor in the chest with an accusatory finger. 

“You killed my brother. Haven’t you learned to stay out of people’s lives? Go home where you belong, where they want you. Better yet, you can  _ go to hell. _ ”

Sam looks the girl up and down. Pity clenches his chest, but he’s unable and unwilling to stay for a public browbeating, even if the girl clearly needed the closure. He squeezes Thor’s middle, hoping Thor gets the message.

He doesn’t, and Sam isn’t even surprised.

Clearly moved and despite their pressing need to get the _ fuck out of Dodge _ , Thor reaches up as if to put his hands on the girl’s shoulders. She wrenches backwards and slaps his hands away.

“You don’t get to touch me,” she hisses.

“I understand what it is like to lose a brother.”

“ _ Understand _ ,” she sneers, her face twisted cruelly, “do you  _ understand _ what it’s like to kill one?”

Thor’s expression is the dreadful, resigned wait for the guillotine drop.

“Yes,” he murmurs. “I know no apology is sufficient.”

Sam knows the click of a long-range rifle like the Apostle’s Creed, familiar to his blood and his body if not to conscious thought; recognized upon hearing it, but not thought upon when not in immediate need. For one Barnes related reason or another, Sam hasn’t been on the wrong end of it for long enough that the  _ schnickt _ that settles at the back of his neck is a shock, though it maybe shouldn’t be. It was bound to be his time eventually.

Thor feels it, too. For all Sam knows, he probably really hears it.

Sam feels like a colossal dumbass as he fiddles with his belt — Tony thought he was  _ so funny _ , putting the beta version of his new wings and shield there like he was in some Saturday morning cartoon. He slips the small disk out of its belt nook and shoves it in its divot in his watch; four and a half seconds, Tony said. If he’s wrong, Sam will come back from the dead and never let Stark know peace.

“Down!” Thor bellows, launching himself at the girl, pulling her and several of her neighbors under the shelter of his body.

Sam’s watch  _ pings  _ exactly like the compound elevators before his shield blooms to life, and only a second before the bullets start flying.

It’s photons or cooled plasma or something else that gave Bruce and Tony science-boners and Sam pretended to understand as they babbled to him about it, more caffeine than human after a three day lab-binge. It was funny, at first. Sam had cupped the disc, the size of a watch battery, in his palm and held it close to his face, like he couldn’t see it at all.

“I can’t even get a vibranium  _ alloy _ ? This hologram doesn’t even have a star on it!”    


Steve had knocked Sam’s shoulder with his own, laughing as he took it between his own thumb and forefinger. “Guess you’ve gotta…. _ earn your stripes _ .”

“That made me see green, Steve,” Bruce groaned. 

But it doesn’t seem funny now in the least as he sees each impact through the red translucency of the shield, his body flinching as each bullet hits and ricochets like it knows it shouldn’t be possible for something so flimsy looking to hold. 

People dive behind him as Sam tries to gain ground against the onslaught, pushing against the bodies that were instead immobilized with fear, their hands over their heads. The shots are coming from only one angle, he can see that as he hops onto the fountain’s ledge, which is a stroke of luck Sam can’t quite believe. Or a trap.

Probably a trap. 

Apartments line the north side of the street. At the corner of its fourth floor, one unit has it’s windows open despite the rain. 

As if to reward him for noticing, the shots start coming faster. He couldn’t cover the street and reach up there, and Thor wasn’t at his back to help. 

Alright, alright.

Tony said he could widen and narrow this damn, thing, but how—

All the gunfire stops at once. There is still screaming and the sound of fumbling bodies over fallen saxophones. The feeling of sweaty skin clinging to him, strangers’ pleading hands that he shakes off. He keeps the shield raised as he chances a quick look back. Thor rises to his feet behind him, still covering the girl but looking skyward. 

Sam looks back up at the apartment window. Even its curtains are still. 

From his right, on the ground, a bang.

He twists off the fountain and the bullet only catches his side. The burn is a familiar pain and easy to shelve as he lunges forward, looking for other agents on the ground as he settles for the one closest to him. He snaps the LSF agent’s wrist as they try to fire again, the sound a pleasure as the gun fumbles from their grip, an opening for Sam to slam his knee into their gut. They stumble backward, but not before getting a hit on the wound at Sam’s side. Hissing, Sam falls back a step. It’s enough for the agent to grab at their second piece, holstered at their thigh, and fire. Sam dives to his left, and the bullet misses him as he barrel rolls behind cover and back to his feet. 

Thor yells behind him. Sam looks back instinctively, his lungs useless weight in his chest—Thor, unable to be taken by a Midgardian bullet, surely, surely, please— 

The girl, her guts spilling out as red as her boots, limp at Thor’s feet.

God _ dammit _ .

Nothing he can do. He looks back for the agent and sees them already trying to disappear in the crowd. He runs as if the pain at his side is a propeller and not a deterrent, leaping the final bounds to slam the humming shield into the agent’s back with both his hands. 

The agent falls, and Sam falls with them. He brings the shield back down again, higher on their back. Under Sam’s weight they loll bonelessly, and Sam sees the delicate joint where their jaw meets the soft, giving column of their throat. 

His chest rattles with each heavy breath. He should do it. 

There is the flash of a camera above. 

Sam wrenches himself up, stumbling. He yanks the shield disc out of the watch with half a mind to throw it to the ground and leave it. 

He should find Thor. They should go. They should probably do that.

Thor is crouched over the girl, his massive hands trembling and—Sam shakes his head, trying to unsee it—glowing. Thor’s skin a lampshade, all the veins and filigree of bones standing out in red lace relief.

Sam’s fingers are slick and warm and tingling towards numbness as he falls to his knees beside Thor. His brow is furrowed, peppered with sweat, as he stares down at Thor’s hands, still pressing down on her middle like there was anything he could do to scoop the viscera back up and into her stiff body.

“Thor.” It comes out a croak. “She’s—there’s nothing you can do. We have to...we need to go.”

“No, I can do it. She showed me how to. I’ve seem  _ him  _ do it a million times, I know I can fix it.”

Sam’s hand shakes as he grips Thor’s shoulder, using it as an anchor to bear down on as he pushes himself up. Thor doesn’t appear to notice.

“Thor. You can’t bring her back from the dead. She’s gone, let her rest.”

“I  _ can’t just leave _ —”

Sirens are wailing and close. Sam can only see Thor in the flashes of red and blue, and between them in the blackness of full dark now settled on the street, it’s like he isn’t even there. 

The crowd that didn’t flee is rising to surround them, pressing close for a look or a picture. An old man in a faded green baseball cap pushes through the rest. He kneels on the other side of the girl’s body. His English is slow and accented heavily but unmistakably clear.

“Of course you can leave. Isn’t that what you people do?”

 


	5. 05.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 20:09  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/05.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Five**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/05.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**05.** _

Thor offers to carry him for the third time only four blocks out from the square as they look for an appropriately shady motel to stitch Sam’s side up.

“I can walk,” Sam grinds out. “Too much attention if you carry me.”

Thor wraps his arm around Sam more tightly, his balled up sweatshirt pressed to Sam’s bleeding ribs, held firm by his hand, steady and no longer luminescent. Sam hasn’t had the gumption to ask him about that particular party trick yet.

“Walking is not good for your injury, Sam.”

“Neither is getting shot at again if they spot us playing leapfrog. Here, this one. This one’s fine.”

Sam takes the baseball cap from his head and puts it on Thor, bringing the bill down as low as possible. He takes Thor’s balled up hoodie from his side and shucks it on as they approach the front door, already missing the pressure on his injury.

“Book it quickly, please.” He shoves half the remaining bills from his wallet into Thor’s hands. “Gonna sit outside, they’ll charge us if I bleed in there.”

“That is a very poor joke.” Thor is frowning as he enters the lobby, but Sam is getting used to seeing it.

The sidewalk outside the neon-littered hostel front is cool and damp. It’s hard to not sprawl back on it, and Sam compromises by leaning back on his elbows, his feet stretched out into the street.

He can see Thor ring the bell on the counter from the front window. Sam can even hear it, a bit, outside. It is suddenly very funny.

The drizzle is still misting, blessedly cool on his hot face when Thor steps back out, dropping a hand to Sam’s shoulder. Sam allows himself to be helped up, and when they reach the foot of the stairs he doesn’t even complain that Thor hooks an arm behind his knees and carries him up to the second floor, bridal style. Sam knows they look like tools. 

Sam pinches the side of Thor’s neck when he doesn’t put him down as they crest the landing. Thor is slow putting him down on his feet.

“For the record, I could have walked.”

“You’re out of breath from being carried.”

“Your point?”

Thor doesn’t answer, his face stony as he unlocks their room. Sam throws his backpack on the bed, and Thor follows suit. 

“Let me look at your injury, Sam.”

“That was the plan.” He grunts. ”Stop that kicked-puppy thing Steve taught you. I get enough of that at home. You good with a needle?” Sam tries to peel his shirt off, but Thor bats his hands away. He is careful to not touch Sam as he removes the shirt.

“Lie down.”

Sam raises an eyebrow. Thor isn’t moved. 

“Your bedside manner is  _ remarkable _ .” But Sam is complying despite his snark, ready to be stitched up and able to move. 

Thor prods at his side for a moment, a bit rough even when he’s clearly trying to be gentle, before going into the bathroom for a washcloth. 

“I can’t see if there’s any pieces still in there. It looks...odd.”

“Of course it does,” Sam sighs. “Help me up, let me take a look.”

Thor blinks at him before returning to the bathroom, leaving Sam on the bed, blinking owlishly.

“Did you forget something, Big Guy?”

Thor returns with the bathroom’s wall mirror in his hands. 

“You are  _ shitting me _ —”

He angles the mirror so Sam can see the wound. Cleaned up like this, he can see what Thor means. The injury is uneven and not clean, likely from Sam twisting to dodge it. It doesn’t look normal, but it doesn’t look as bad as it could have been, either. It’s not so deep they can’t stitch it up themselves.

“I’ll have Bruce look at it when we get back. We won’t be here longer than another day or so if we’re lucky.”

Thor looks at him, his mouth in a flat, thin line. Sam ignores it. 

“Just stitch it up. If anything is in there, it’s small enough to wait. It’s gonna have to be. Kit’s in my bag.”

“That is your professional opinion?” Thor says slowly, his tongue poking out between his teeth as he tries to thread the needle. Sam’s heart is beating fast but only because he is bleeding, and hurt, and possibly in shock, and under an extreme amount of stress, and stuff. 

“I have a crisis management certificate from the Army.”

Thor smiles over at him, thin but there. “I think that’s supposed to be funny.” 

Sam looks up to the ceiling and tries think past the stinging drag of the needle. “Everything I say is funny.”

“Very nearly. Does this hurt?”

“Sure does.”

“I will try to hurry. I’ve never been good with this.”

Sam looks down. Thor is looking at his ribs with such singular focus that Sam nearly doesn’t ask.

“Is that what that was, back there? The night light hands?”

Thor’s hands still. “I was never patient enough to learn when my mother tried to teach me any magic, even healing magic, even though I knew I needed it. It looked so easy I thought...when I really needed it, that it was just come to me. We share the same blood after all. The same magic, I thought.” Thor exhales, but none of the tension leaves his body. “But Loki had those gifts. He shared nothing of our blood and he still was…”

Sam lets him trail off as he finishes the stitches. He doesn’t speak again until he’s ripping open a gauze pad to put on top of his work. 

Thor doesn’t look up. “What you said to me before. You were right.”

“I didn’t mean it like that girl —”

“Please listen. I...was upset because I knew you were right. Even before the square. About my need to be seen. Thinking I am better than I am.” He tapes the gauze on neater than Sam thought he would have the care to.  “I haven’t grown at all since I was first banished to Midgard. Maybe I’m never meant to learn this lesson. Perhaps pride is my burden, like greed is my brother’s.”

Sam grabs Thor’s hand as it pulls back, holding his wrist. Sam feels young, somehow, and it doesn’t feel at all adequate when he finally finds something to say. “You’re being too hard on yourself.”

Thor doesn’t shake him off, but he’s not looking at Sam either. “Maybe I don’t want to learn, perhaps that’s my problem.”

* * *

They rest at the hostel for four and a half hours. Sam sleeps two of them, after Thor makes a run to the vending machine at the corner of the street to get him a Coke and a candy bar filled with banana-flavored marshmallows, covered in chocolate. Sam had been on a banana moratorium after Steve and Barnes discovered that “bananas weren’t the same anymore,” and forced all manner of banana, artificial and otherwise, into his digestive system on the World’s Worst Food Tour, but it turns out to not be so bad.

“What is this one again?” He asks when he’s halfway through it.

Thor shrugs. “I’m unsure. It was the most expensive, I figured it was the most filling.”

Sam stops chewing, watching Thor fiddle with what looks like a little tube of toothpaste. “And do I want to know what that is?”

Thor squeezes some in his mouth. He stares off in the middle-distance as he ponders its flavor.

“Sweet.”

He turns to Sam with the tube aloft. “Open your mouth?”

Sam is a fool but he does it because — because. Thor leans over and squeezes some of the candy onto his tongue, then looks at him expectantly. Sam swallows, hardly able to believe it.

“This...is condensed milk. They — Thor, you bought condensed milk from a vending machine? They  _ sell _ condensed milk like this? They just eat it straight?”

“Is this not common elsewhere in Midgard?”

“ _ No _ .”

Thor hums, taking some more in his mouth. “But...it  _ is  _ delicious.”

“Yes.”

Sam falls asleep after, and when he wakes forces Thor to rest as well. He maps out another route to Sokovia as Thor sleeps, hoping it’s enough. They’re already likely to miss Barnes and Wanda at their original checkpoint, but if they haul ass they might be able to make it, so Sam won’t risk a call telling them to go ahead without them again just yet. 

He’s watching a soap opera rerun when Thor stirs beside him on the bed. Thor is bleary eyed in the way that speaks of still being more asleep than awake as he slings his arm out to pull Sam close, tugging him half under his ridiculous weight.

“Ow? Ow. Ow.”

Thor shoots up, hair a riot and a red crease on his cheek.

“Are you alright? Have I hurt you?”

Sam feels around the gauze at his side; still on. The stitches still intact, no bleeding. “Nah, just interrupted my show. I think that man has a twin, but I can’t be sure.” Sam is very unhelpfully picturing all the slim, bony lines of Jane Foster’s body, skinny in the way of too little food and sunlight, perhaps in favor of books and coffee, as he rises from the bed, feeling awkward now that Thor has also vacated it. “I mean, I’m not so delicate.”

“Delicate enough,” Thor sighs, running a hand over his face. “Are you well enough to move?”

Sam is slower than he’d usually be shouldering his bag, but he does it. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t ask me that.”

He’d changed shirts while Thor slept, shoved the old one in the trash since it wouldn’t matter if anyone found out they were here after they were gone. Thor’s sweatshirt followed it into the bin, and he watches Thor now change into a long-sleeved blue henley from his bag before pulling on his shoes. If Sam has to squeeze his eyes shut to ensure he doesn’t think, say, or do anything particularly foolish as the muscles of Thor’s back and shoulders ripple in the yellow lamplight, that is no one’s business.

Sam puts on a pair of sunglasses as Thor dons Sam’s baseball cap, and they exit into still, silent darkness. 

* * *

Dawn crests golden pink over Bransklii, and each step further into Sokovia and away from the Czech Republic is a relief.

“Do you think they have the Starbucks, Sam?”

Sam looks over, eyebrows raised. “You need a pit stop?” 

“I would not mind a coffee.” Thor’s stomach rumbles loudly. “And, perhaps, a muffin. But if we cannot...”

Sam looks down at his watch. “I don’t know if I can promise The Starbucks, but coffee we can do. That’s a good idea.”

The streets of Bransklii were likely never truly full, but are still emptier than Sam feels they are supposed to be. It’s three and a half hours from here to Novi Grad, but there’s a heaviness still to the air that feels like half their country is still floating above their heads, and everyone is just waiting for the drop. The colors of Liberec were faded pastel with time but at least had the suggestion of color, whereas the buildings here were grey, uniform, joyless. Even the little cafe they find with it’s dark green awning over the outdoor seating doesn’t seem particularly welcoming. Sam realizes it’s like walking in one of the black and white pictures of the U.S.S.R. in his high school history textbook. 

Sokovia was suffering enough, before they came to give them another serving. Sam wasn’t there with Ultron, but he is very aware as the little bell on the cafe door signals their entry that it doesn’t matter. He is as responsible as Thor. 

Thor pretends to be occupied looking at the glass display where the pastries are displayed while Sam orders. He gets them the biggest coffees they have, a danish for himself, and three different, fist-sized muffins for Thor so he can try each flavor. Sam has seen Thor eat enough to know it won’t really fill his stomach, but it’s better than nothing.  

They sit outside in silence as yellow morning stretches its legs over the small, empty, grey square. It doesn’t seem to benefit any from its warmth. 

“Which is this one, again, Sam?”

Sam looks up, swallowing his last bite of the dry danish. The wrappers for Thor’s chocolate chip and blueberry muffins are already strewn across the table, littered with crumbs. “Lemon-poppyseed, it looks like.”

“It is the best one,” Thor nods decisively after another long, thoughtful chew. 

Sam’s mom made the best lemon-poppyseed muffins, they even had a glaze on them, Sam knows he has her old recipe box somewhere —

He clears his throat, directing his attention to the small, grainy television the cafe had mounted underneath the awning for their outdoor guests to watch. It’s captioned in English — if this was the touristy part of Sokovia, they were in for a real slow day until they reached the checkpoint — and playing the morning news. Sam reads along as Thor finishes the muffin.

“Four European banks: the BPCE, Banka Kovanica, Eximbanka SR, and Barclays, have experienced total server blackouts, seemingly in unison. Officials state all servers were functioning until approximately 3:45 am, Central European Time. Only Eximbanka SR has been able to reboot its server, and its Chief Financial Officer has reported all of their records, employee and customer alike, have been wiped. All of the accounts have been seemingly drained, leaving only their on-site cash. EU and local authorities speculate a single entity responsible for all blackouts, but are neglecting to yet label it as ‘cyber-terrorism.’ Eximbanka SR is urging its customers to remain calm as they sort through last night’s events.”

Sam whistles. The remaining coffee in his cup is cold.

“Is that Johnson?”

Thor has a poppy seed stuck to the stubble on his chin. Sam nods. “That would be Johnson. You ready to get back to it?”

But Thor isn’t looking at Sam anymore, his face pinched as he stares at the TV. Sam looks back to it to find a photograph of himself splayed over the headline, the energy shield in hand and raised above the LSF agent from yesterday.

“A NEW CAPTAIN AMERICA?”

He collects his cup, then Thor’s strewn muffin debris, and tries to ignore it. He’s seen enough of those stories and think-pieces and twitter threads to last him for a lifetime. But Thor remains frozen in his seat. 

“Thor, come on. It doesn’t matter.”

No dice. Sam sighs, leaning on the table as he watches the story unfold.

“Is ‘Captain America’ a title anyone can carry?” A moustached man in a red cardigan asks, pointing across the table at an older man across the table. “Would the Accords apply to anyone with the title ‘Captain America,’ or just to Steve Rogers specifically? They did not address how titles would pass between enhanced-persons.”

The picture cuts to a thin woman in a red dress, smiling and shaking her well-coiffed head from what looks like an office or a library. “The bigger problem is: the world knew Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers died once for justice. This man is a stranger — who is he? What has he done to earn anyone’s respect or trust?”

It cuts back to the studio, where the older man scoffs, his bald head reflecting the studio lights. 

“You are not looking at the big picture. This is clearly another attempt by the U.S. government to undermine the stability of smaller countries. They would never accept any ‘Captain Russia’ or ‘Captain Cuba’ operating in New York, but they can have several ‘Captain America’s operating simultaneously in other sovereign nations. It is no different than when they had the CIA in Nicaragua. It is colonialism in a new form, where we are supposed to be grateful for their uninvited intrusion.”

Thor looks up at him. “What is he referring to?”

Sam rubs a hand over his face. “Come on, get up. We can’t sit here forever.”

“Sam.”

“I’ll tell you, just come on. The owner is waiting for us to leave.”

Thor has his head turned to read the captions even as they turn a corner to another street.

Sam hates his job.

Thor’s hand is molten iron around Sam’s wrist, and when Sam stops and turns to face him Thor’s gaze is equally heavy, equally full of fire.

“What I said yesterday...I did not mean it the way those people were saying those things to you. About you, when they don’t even know you. I know you have earned that shield, and you’ve earned my…” Thor swallows, looks down at his shoes before raising his eyes to Sam again. “Please say you understand.”

Sam clears his thick throat, unable to look at Thor’s visible self-recrimination any longer. “Of course. We were both upset, it’s nothing. We’re good. We’re good.” He takes a deep breath. “Johnson is already in Latveria if she was able to pull a stunt that big off. That was probably her payment for Doom helping her out. We’re gonna need new wheels if we want to meet the Goon Squad anything close to on time.”

Thor looks at him expectantly. “I hope you are going to put that in English.”

“We’re gonna steal a car, Thor.”


	6. 06.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 21:26  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/06.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Six**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/06.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**06.** _

Thor slides in the passenger seat of their silver Renault Clio with open wonder on his face.

“I hadn’t expected you to have criminal leanings, Sam Wilson. Who taught you to do this?”

Sam smirks at him as they peel onto the street from the hotel parking lot they found the car in. “Would you believe me if I said Captain America?”

The car smells like cigarettes but has close to a full tank of gas, and Thor is immensely pleased as he starts poking around the buttons on the dash to find the owner left several mix CDs in the player and a slim CD case in the console that he flips through eagerly, squinting at the titles as if he would have any idea what any of them were.

“Do you think these are good? Dr. Selvig says he prefers your records to the — phone? Phone music.”

Sam snorts. “I think he means the big ones, but he’s not wrong. I have some at the house —”

“May I come over to hear them?”

His stomach shoots up to his throat. “Of...if you want, of course. Yeah.”

Thor beams as he picks a CD at random and shoves it in the player. 

It snaps in half. 

Sam is very careful to keep his eyes on the road as Thor cradles the broken plastic in his hands.

“Can it play like this?”

Thor is clearly distraught, and Sam tries to keep his voice even and his expression neutral as he shakes his head. From the corner of his eye, he sees Thor nestle both broken pieces into its original slot before taking another out so gingerly Sam is unsure if he is touching it at all. 

He yanks his hand away from the disc as soon as the player starts to suck in the CD.

“You make some finicky machines.”

“They’re sturdy enough for most of us,” Sam offers blandly. Their arms are pressed close together in the confines of the car like this. If they wanted, if they were maybe in this car for any other reason than this shit op in this shit country, Sam could flip his hand up on the gearshift. If Sam is allowing himself to dream like this, Thor would fit his fingers between Sam’s, his thumb brushing Sam’s wrist. 

If Sam is being self indulgent, maybe he stretches his hand out to rest on the taut, dense muscle of Thor’s thigh, his thumb sweeping arcs above Thor’s knee. 

But this is not a dream, and Sam keeps his hands on the steering wheel.

The CD is Enya, and Thor loves it. Of course he does. 

* * *

“May I ask you something?”

Sam had been close to dozing, his brain and body both on autopilot on the long stretches of Sokovian back roads, uninterrupted by more than the very occasional stoplight or roadside stand, selling fruit preserves or homemade butters and honeys. He bites down a yawn as he glances over to the passenger’s seat.

“Yeah, man. Shoot.”

“Were you unhappy as the Falcon?”

Sam sits up straighter in his seat, very awake. “Was I what?”

“Is that why you took on the new name?”

The A/C in the car is weak, and the sunlight through the windshield is warm and dry on his arms, his face. He dares a sidelong glance at Thor, looking at him steadily in the passenger’s seat. 

Thor has made every effort to be Sam’s friend, really, since that welcome home party. Sam could put in a little effort on this long drive, if only to drown out Enya still warbling from the speakers.

“I thought after I came back — I was pararescue, in the Army. I don’t know if you know that. But, when I came back I thought I was done. I was  _ glad  _ to be done. I finished my Master’s, I was settled with the VA and my job there. But.” He makes a vague motion with his hand. “When I met Steve, I couldn’t sit out anymore. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t, you know, try to get back in.”

“That’s honorable.”

Sam just shrugs. “Maybe. I didn’t realize I missed it until I had the wings again. Then I thought, I would be fine with this, just like it was. I was helping like I wasn’t able to when I was in the service, I didn’t have all the red tape, and Steve is — you know how he is, how he can make you feel like you’re the only person on earth who could make a damn.  And I thought I could try to...to make up, for some of the damage I’d done. That’s what it felt like.”

Thor nudges his hand resting on the gearshift. “What damage could you possibly have done?”

Riley’s face is tanned to the point of leatheriness around his goggles, which sit perpetually crooked over his plum-ugly, crooked nose. Sam sees him laughing, doing his god-awful George W. Bush impression, behind his eyelids. His lips are chapped with the dry desert heat but stretched wide over his smile as he punches Sam’s shoulder, smacking on Big Red loudly and with his mouth open like he has no home training.

Sam takes a deep breath, the smell of old tobacco in the car taking him out of the desert, into the present.

“More than I can fix. But Steve is who got me back in, and I owe him — don’t ever mention I said that, by the way. Steve helped me out. We help each other out. I know that Cap is important to him even if he can’t do it himself anymore. And...it’s important to me, too.”

“So you take it upon yourself, just like that?” Thor murmurs. Sam refuses to look and see what his expression is, to make his voice so soft in this small, quiet car.

“Someone had to. I had some extra time on my hands.” 

Thor doesn’t answer, but it was a flat kind of joke, anyway. 

The quiet stretches long enough Sam can’t stand it. “What about you? You could have stayed on Planet...not Earth. Several times. You keep coming back like it’s your job.”

“It is my job,” Thor says after a silence so still Sam didn’t expect an answer. “I owe Midgard a debt, I intend to repay it. In all the Nine Realms I think I have never learned so much. It has brought good people to my life, and it’s anyone’s duty to protect those they choose to keep close.”

“Sounds pretty honorable.”

Thor’s smile is close to bitter. “I’m glad you think so. The Allfather has told me I would be doing you all a better service to leave you be. It was, apparently, the one thing he and my brother agreed on. The Allmother never said as much to me, but I wonder if she thought it, especially after I returned Loki and the Tesseract. But...I can’t. I...for selfish reasons, I always find a way back.”

Sam thinks this is as good excuse as any to reach over and turn the volume on the Enya CD, still playing on loop, down. 

“You aren’t allowed to put yourself first, sometimes, Big Guy? What’s so bad about you coming down to visit the little people once in awhile?”

Thor keeps his gaze straight forward through the windshield, but he’s smiling ruefully. “Not all of you are so small.” He pauses. “I cannot come to Midgard without causing pain to some degree. Like with Ultron, like in London. Even to...individuals who I would rather not hurt. By virtue of myself, not an enemy.”

Sam furrows his brow. “Is this about Jane — uh, calling it off?”

Thor turns to him, blinking owlishly. “Jane? Do you know the good Lady?”

“What?”

“What?”

Ahead of them, Sam sees a red truck has veered off the road somehow, its front end crashed into a large tree, pluming acrid grey smoke from its hood that they can smell even in their car. The road is empty, and when the car’s owner sees them approach, they clamber out of the front and start to wave them down.

He and Thor share a wary glance.

“There’s no buildings around here for a sniper to settle,” Sam says slowly, decreasing the accelerator despite himself.

“If we leave and they are truly in need, that would be a shame.”

“And yet, I don’t really want to stop.”

“I believe that is what Darcy would call a ‘trust issue.’”

Sam snorts. “And what do you call it?”

“After our previous experiences, I would call it a valid concern.”

They peel off onto the shoulder and the car’s owner, a small woman with dark, wispy hair escaping from her loose bun, rushes out to meet them. Her hands are tough with regular manual labor, but her nails very clean and neat when she reaches for Sam’s own.

“Thank you, I do not — I fell asleep, inside.”

Sam nods and tries to peek around the front of the car.

“I do not think it will run anymore, Sam,” Thor says slowly. Sam rolls his eyes.

“Looking for a gas leak, I know what  _ I’m  _ doing here. Why don’t you deal with shaking hands and kissing babies?”

Thor whips around, looking in the car, behind the woman, still speaking as if either of them understood Sokovian, and even around his own big feet, as if he would have accidentally stepped on one. “What baby?” 

Sam wants to  _ thunk  _ his head against the hood of the car a few times, but refrains. “Just make her stop babbling in my ear, Thor.”

The hood is a mangled knot of metal, and Sam’s not really able to look in and see the extent of the damage. He wipes his hands on his pants and steps back around to the woman.

“Have you called anyone?”

“No phone. No call.”

Sam sighs. He has an extra prepaid in his bag, he will toss it after she calls. He hates his job.

“Let me get you mine, hold on.”

He is rustling in his bag in the backseat when Thor approaches. 

“She won’t speak to me.”

“Lucky you. Don’t pout.”

Halfway back to the truck, Sam notices there aren’t any skidmarks on the road leading off to the tree. He frowns. She’d had to have hit the brakes at some point, even if she was asleep when she originally went off the road, to be alive. As damaged as the front end is, to be basically sealed shut on itself, she’d been going too fast to not be hurt otherwise —

Sam comes to a stop, Thor hovering by his side. The woman looks frazzled, but she’s not bleeding anywhere. A part of the windshield has cracked like a spiderweb, a few pieces of glass are missing from its mosaic. She doesn’t have a scratch. 

He reaches out and grabs Thor’s wrist.

“We have got to go,” he breathes. “Right now.”

The woman calls out to them. There is a noise in the air that raises the hair on Sam’s arms. They are far too close.

“Sam? Sam, what is it?”

He is breathing heavily through his nose, looking skyward, around them on the road, ready for the other shoe to drop. “Gas leak — car bomb? Bad news. Go. Now.” 

The woman lunges, and Sam dodges to the side as a small baton appears in her hand, buzzing with an electrical current when it gets too close to Sam’s ear. Thor stumbles back, tripping over Sam’s feet and knocking into their car hard enough the side door dents in on itself like aluminum foil. The woman comes for Sam again, but he kicks her feet out from under her as Thor tries to start their car.

“I am pressing every button, Samuel, what am I doing wrong?” He hollers. 

“Just  _ run _ !” Sam yells, already turning on his heel when the woman grabs his knees from the ground and he tumbles. The hissing is loud from her truck, the air hot and dry and ripe for fire like a piece of flint. He kicks the woman in the chest so hard he hears the crack of her clavicle like a pomegranate split apart under his boot. 

He rolls back up to his feet but doesn’t find Thor anywhere to be seen. The car gives a protesting whine, then a sizzling pop that crescendos and multiplies on itself, and Sam is sure he is going to die. There is no way he gets out of here fast enough. 

Thor charges at the car, fast as a freight train, Mjölnir in his hand. He is hardly skidded to a stop before he takes it like a baseball bat to the car and it shoots up, not even at the highest point of its arc when it blows. 

“Holy _ fucking shit _ !’

Hot debris and flaming metal falls down like rain around them. Sam raises his arm over his head to shield himself from the worst of it, but Thor walks through the shower, unbothered. Through the cover of his arm, he sees Thor stalk through the acrid smoke and fire around them on this empty road and understands, suddenly, why someone would mistake this man and the men like him as a god. Thor has never looked so menacing, so ready to hurt. Thor has never seemed so inhuman.

He grabs a piece of scrap metal from the ground, still red and glowing at its end, sizzling with heat, and skewers it into the woman’s bicep to pin her to the ground. 

“I hope your friends think to check on you soon.”

Sam has not blinked in what feels like hours as Thor rises to walk over to him, still curled in on himself to avoid the debris. 

“We should go. Are you injured? Can you move?”

He tries to feel around his body. Thor had walked to him in slow motion, but now Sam feels a bit like someone has pressed the fast forward button on everything around him. He is itching to be off the ground and out of here. “Pulled some of the stitches, but I’m fine. I’m good. Help me up.” 

Thor grabs Sam’s outstretched hand and slides the other underneath the small of Sam’s back, holding him steady as he guides Sam to his feet. Sam blinks away the flashing pops of stars smattering his vision, still clutching Thor’s hand as his world reorients.

“Car doesn’t work, does it?”

Thor shifts on his feet. “I may have done some amount of damage in my eagerness, I can’t be sure, myself.”

Sam’s chest clenches. “Are the bags —”

“Your wings are safe, I got them out. I made sure to get them, it’s alright.” 

He and Thor hobble (one more than the other) to their Clio, salvaging the prepaids, Sam’s wings, and Thor’s backpack. While Sam is turning away, he sees Thor reach into the front seat to grab the Enya CD from the player and shove it into his bag. 

“I have a suggestion you may not like,” Thor says slowly as he straightens from the car.

“You? Do that?”

“I can fly us out of here. It isn’t  _ subtle _ , but it will be faster.”

Sam is tired, the smoke and stench of burning metal making his eyes water, making his nose feel like it’s clogged with cement. Off of the ground and upright, his side is starting to ache anew. 

“I don’t care, right now. We just launched an exploding car into the sky, so as long as you don’t have a SkyWrite attached to you let’s just do it.”

Thor nods, but is slow wrapping an arm around Sam’s back. “I will try to be gentle.”

Sam squeezes his eyes shut. Steve Rogers is laughing about this, somewhere. His injured side is braced against Thor, and he slides an arm around Thor’s waist as Thor swings Mjölnir in his free hand like a propeller. 

It’s different, than the wings. Flying like this is falling in reverse, exactly like those freefall rides at the county fair. Sam’s not afraid of heights, he’s not even afraid of falling; but even after Riley, even after being shot at and shot down more times than he can count, the wings feel like a security blanket or a safety net, like they clip him to an invisible zip line. Here, Sam has nothing but Thor’s promise. 

He should have thought to ask where, exactly, Thor was planning to take them, careening through the clear sky in broad afternoon daylight. In retrospect, it seems like an important question. But Thor is oddly relaxed beside him, and Sam convinces himself that it’s because he knows exactly where he is going and what he is doing. Then he’s mostly just jealous; Sam is doing at least a constant, conscious plank even to coast with his wings. 

It’s true that Nat told Sam his abs were nicer than Steve’s for it, once, but it doesn’t seem like a consolation today. Thor could be in a fancy thera-pedic bed with some million thread count bedsheets, as lax as his body is. And wouldn’t that be nice, right now?

Thor squeezes Sam briefly before they make their descent ten minutes later onto the roof of a parking garage. It’s adjacent to a factory of some kind, gated with chain link and barbed wire around its sprawling acreage, white steam puffing out in continuous clouds from its several turrets. 

Thor doesn’t release Sam immediately.

“It can take a moment to regain your balance, I’ve heard.”

Sam rolls his eyes, still a bit high, maybe, from flying. “Buddy, the girls only told you that to hold on a little longer. And my wings go much, much faster, by the way. Just so you know.”

The corners of Thor’s eyes are crinkled with a small, private smile. “And what of the men, then?”

His stomach does a little somersault. Sam ignores it. “Thirst knows no gender,” he manages around his dry throat.

Thor had told him, before, and in plain English, what he wanted from Sam. Just friendship, he’d said. 

But Thor is very close, now. There’s a bend in his nose from a break that didn’t heal well, his very blue eyes are steady looking down to Sam’s face, his very blue shirt sun warm under Sam’s hands, downy golden hair peeking from his collar that catches the light as his chest rises and falls with his even breathing.

Still close, now.

Very close.

Sam pulls away as a loud alarm sounds from the factory, blinking hard. One of their phones starts to ring in Sam’s bag, and Sam digs for it while carefully avoiding looking at Thor’s face.

Steve is FaceTiming him. Sam answers with a frown. 

On the screen, Sam can see Steve is pointing his phone camera through one of the glass-walled conference rooms in the compound. He can also see Steve losing his shit in the reflection on the glass, red-faced with trying to stifle his laughter. Inside the conference room, Tony is trying to placate the vice-president; he’s clearly just been pulled from the lab, oil smeared on his face and his hands, both of which are raised as if in surrender. The vice-president has a vein swollen close to bursting at his temple, his tie half undone and his suit jacket a wrinkled riot  as he screeches:

“ _ You launched a missile on foreign soil! _ ”

Sam groans as he ends the call. 

“You’re not getting a souvenir,” he texts, before turning the phone on silent.  


	7. 07.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 17:50  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/07.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Seven**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/07.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_ **07.** _

They sit with their legs dangling off the edge of the parking garage after risking a call to Barnes and Wanda, who are only twenty minutes out from their location. (Sam’s luck was bound to turn around sometime.) They would meet them at the back entrance to the factory before the four of them took the last mile of their journey to the checkpoint together, and hopefully be home before anything else went to shit.

“I was wondering why you chose to land in the middle of bumfuck like this,” Sam muses. “Thought maybe you couldn’t. You know. Keep it up.”

“I memorized the map, like you asked. I have a good sense for direction.”

Thor’s smirking face is turned up to catch the sun like a particularly well-fed cat. He doesn’t rise to the barb at all, and the easy confidence to take it in stride, not even a little threatened, makes Sam’s stomach flutter. Sam leans back on his elbows, watching the factory employees mill about on their lunch break. 

“Ah, I’m just not used to people taking my words to heart like that, then.”

Thor snorts, nudging at him with his shoulder. Despite himself, Sam lets a slow, easy smile spread on his face at the familiarity in it. 

“I have always been told I’m a good listener,” Thor says breezily. 

“You listen to yourself better than anyone I’ve ever known,” Sam shoots back, equally light, as Wanda and Barnes crest their vision, two dark dots approaching among the scattered trees on the only-barely green lot. 

Thor helps him up wordlessly, still grinning, and doesn’t wait for permission or even a warning before sinking them down to the ground. 

Wanda is waving at them behind the gate, looking oddly serene. She has french braided Barnes’ hair away from his face, freckled from the sun, in the same way hers is. If she looks beautiful for it, Barnes’ resting murder face with the braid looks especially menacing. 

“I hope your weekend has been as bad as ours, at least,” Sam greets them.

“We ate a lot. I got to pet a goat.”

Thor turns to Wanda, blinking. “How did you come across a goat?”

Barnes grimaces. “Please drop the goat. I can’t...talk about it anymore.”

“No, but — do you mean we are the only ones who ran into any trouble, at all?” Sam frowns. 

“You don’t know how to shake a tail anymore?” Barnes asks, eyebrow raised.

Sam pauses. 

“Thor. That car — that. That wasn’t a tail. They expected us there. They were ahead of us, they knew the route we were on.”

Barnes’ whole body tenses. “You’ve got a tracker on you.”

Wanda looks between them uneasily as Thor frowns down at Sam. “When could they have possibly —”

Realization dawns over Sam like ice water. “The  _ square _ ,” he hisses. “You said the entry didn’t look right; because it wasn’t a goddamn slug, that’s when.”

“They’ve had eyes on you this whole time,” Barnes says lowly. His hands twitch, looking for a weapon. “They know where we are now, we’ve got to split.”

“Can we take on Nightshade alone, James?” Wanda frowns. Barnes bites the inside of his cheek before jerking his chin to Sam. 

“You can take Sam back, Thor and I will —” 

Beside him, Thor grabs the little pocketknife from his sweatpants. Without pause, he makes a clean arc to dig it in Sam’s side. 

Sam stumbles, but Thor’s hand braced on his shoulder keeps him from falling backward. Beside him, Barnes is being held back by Wanda, herself looking at Thor in abject horror. Barnes’ face is cold as cryo.

“Thor, what are you doing?” Wanda asks uneasily. 

“Digging it out,” he grunts, frowning like this was obvious. Sam struggles to not buckle under the painfully sharp pressure at his side. Thor wiggles the knife a bit at his ribs and Sam goes cross eyed, his hands scrambling for purchase up at Thor’s shoulders.

Thor removes the knife in a quick, practiced motion, his warm, rough hand replacing it. Sam can feel nothing but his entire side on fire to figure out what he’s doing, but the pressure is relieved soon enough as he pulls out a small disc, the size of Sam’s pinkie nail. Thor frowns as he examines it between his thumb and forefinger before it pops like a popcorn kernel in a flash of blue electricity. Thor flicks the remains away thoughtlessly.

“You definitely just stabbed me,” Sam breathes, lightheaded and feeling nothing but the red wetness warm at his side.

“Wanda can fix it.”

Wanda gapes at Thor. “I haven’t tried — I’ve never practiced something like this! I don’t know if I can —” 

“You can do it,” he tells her warmly. He is very calm, for having Sam bleeding like he is in his grip.

“Anything you do is going to be better than this, Wanda,” Sam wheezes. “Do it now so we can leave, they know we’re here.”

As soon as she loosens her hold on Barnes he lunges for Thor, who tolerates the first hook to his jaw, but catches Barnes’ metal arm when he goes for a second.

“What is  _ wrong with you _ ?”

“Sam deserves to see this mission through, as its leader.” 

Barnes snarls. “Don’t you ever —”

Wanda’s hands are so tentative poking around at his side the restraint hurts worse than if she just punched it. Thor and Barnes are so loud his head is starting to throb. Sam is unsure which hurts worse. 

“Barnes. Hey,  _ hey _ . Buck. I was gonna have to dig it out myself anyway, drop it.” He looks at Thor, mouth a flat line. “Though even a little heads up would have been cool.”

Thor takes a step back, face falling. “I...forgive me, Sam. I thought you would know I. I would never hurt you.”

Sam wants to kick himself. His side is burning like fire ants are crawling over it, but Wanda looks like she’s in more pain than he is, so Sam bears it. He takes as deep a breath as his ribs allow.

“It’s fine. Everyone is fine, we’re gonna head to the checkpoint, grab Johnson, and go the hell home.”

Wanda fusses over him for five minutes, most of that just inspecting the work she did in two. 

“Thanks, Wanda.”

“Let me know if it hurts,” she tells him seriously, brow still creased. He puts a hand on her shoulder and squeezes briefly.

“I feel fit as a fiddle. If we see a goat from here to Latveria, it’s all yours.”

Thor and Barnes are still standing in stony silence, propped on the chainlink fence with several feet between them. Neither of them speak as they start the trek to the checkpoint.

* * *

The Czech Republic was faded, Sokovia joyless, but Latveria, for lack of a better term, is doom and gloom. All the buildings are dark steel and iron, every structure a fortress like it only exists to wait between barrages. Sam’s stomach is heavy with pity as they walk through the streets; no small number of those attacks were by Doom’s hand himself.

His ribs still burn like a blister, but he hadn’t lied to Wanda; she’d healed most of it. He tries to not favor that side as they stalk through the poorly lit, barren streets. It would only throw her off her game.

Around them, night is fast approaching. Barnes is twitchy at Sam’s right, and it’s clearly starting to rub off on everyone else.

“They know we are here,” Barnes mutters in his ear. “They have to. There are cameras everywhere.”

Sam sighs. “I’m sure they’re taking us somewhere fun.”

There is a whirring, mechanic noise above their heads almost as soon as he says it. Barnes leaps to his left and hip-checks Wanda so she stumbles in the shelter of a nearby building’s corner before standing shoulder-to-shoulder next to Sam, Thor at their backs.

Tilda Johnson stands on the roof of the building above them, remarkably casual. Her hands are buried in her grey hoodie’s front pocket, her jeans a bit loose and baggy around her skinny legs. 

“Y’all are so boring.”

Sam rolls his eyes. “Creative opener.”

“And dumb,” she sneers, fumbling around in her hoodie pocket. There are several loud, whining pops that happen all at once, like firecrackers. Barnes stumbles beside him with a grunt.

“Hope you weren’t planning to use any of that tech. Nothing personal.”

“How many times am I gonna have to replace my  _ goddamn arm _ ,” Barnes hisses viciously as Sam looks down to his watch, no longer ticking, the energy shield in his belt that refuses to eject, the piece he has in the back of his jeans that refuses to release its safety.

“Tony Stark has to put his mark on everything, like a pissing dog. Even the guns have his trackers in them, and you know what that makes them? Hackable. Hope you aren’t disappointed.”

“Hope you aren’t expecting this to make a damn,” Sam shoots back, just as bland. “You can’t just hack billions of dollars to shack up with a warlord and get off with it, tech or no.”

Johnson sneers at them before stepping off the roof, sliding down the building’s awning, and landing on the street with light feet. 

“Eat my ass,” she groans. “This is what I’m saying about you being dumb. I didn’t steal anything.”

“You stole that chip from Meachum-Rand,” Wanda insists, her chin jutted out as she steps from behind the building. Barnes sends her a warning glare that she ignores. “That’s how you hacked those banks.”

Johnson rolls her eyes. “Is that how you think computers work now? What is this, 1987?”

Barnes looks to him, and Sam nods. They lunge at once, but no sooner do they move do they see the hoard of LSF agents bleeding out from doorways, rooftops, both sides of the street. From two buildings over, in a swirl of green and grey, Victor von Doom emerges.

Johnson looks nearly as dismayed as they do. He and Barnes skid to a stop.

“Admittedly, I was still expecting Captain America despite myself.” Doom’s voice is distorted through his mask, rumbling like the act of speaking is a protest. “Surely, I thought, when the car went off, he would have to come to the rescue. Kelly told me he was attached to you.” Doom tilts his head, the hood of his ridiculous cape falling backwards to reveal more of the gleaming mechanics of his mask. 

Sam’s stomach is lead as Thor steps forward, brow knotted. “What are you talking about?”

Johnson leans against the building behind her, hands still in her pockets. “How Secretary Kelly arranged my transfer from Ryker’s Island to Latveria to convince you that you needed to come find me, so Doom could keep you as playthings and she wouldn’t have to deal with you,” she drones flatly. “I have stage four ovarian cancer, I was getting treatment in the prison’s infirmary and minding my own damn business. I don’t give a shit about Meachum-Rand or any of this. I told you:  _ dumbasses _ .”

Doom steps forward. “And I told you I’d make your death painless if you drew them out like this for me, and I’m a man of my word.”

But Thor is lunging for Johnson as Doom pulls a gun from his side, pointing it at the both of them. “I’ve had time to develop bullets just for you, Odinson, think if you want to risk it for someone like her. You were prepared to take her in dead or alive not five minutes ago, were you not?”

Thor doesn’t answer his question, chin out as he stands between Johnson and Doom. “If my life didn’t matter to you, you’d already have shot me.”

Doom cocks his head. “You are right.” 

Without looking away from Thor, he points the gun at Sam and fires. Sam dodges, and Wanda deflects it to the closest LSF agent, who catches in in the shoulder. Doom keeps the gun raised, unbothered by the death rattle of one of his men at his feet.

“This Captain isn’t bulletproof to any degree, though the rest of you are. Would you risk him?”

“ _ This _ Captain is right here,” Sam says drily. “You talk as much as Spider Boy.”

No guns, no wings, no shield. Barnes is down an arm, there’s no less than fifty LSF agents surrounding them, and Victor Von Doom seems particularly intent to see Sam dead. So much for his luck turning around.

Johnson is wiggling out from behind Thor, looking harassed. Wanda’s hands are red as lit coals, and Barnes looks more like an animal than a man. Sam’s been in worse spots with less. He reaches into his pocket for Dáinsleif and shoves it into the LSF agent’s stomach closest to him in one smooth motion. 

Wanda flings seven agents back at once into the building nearest when they move to close in on Sam, pulling his blade out from the man’s stomach. The sound of crashing glass prompts the others around them to action. Thor holds his hand up above the fray and Mjölnir flies to meet it as Barnes ploughs through the agents unfortunate enough to be around him. A snapped neck, a broken clavicle — three separate places, popping like bubblewrap —  a radius that bursts through the skin of a forearm with a sick, squelching crack.

Sam has not ever really had practice with sword fighting, and there’s only so much magic can do, it seems. His swipes land more often than not and the length of the blade cuts a wide arc that the agents can’t come near, but he can’t block the same and stumbles on his feet as one of the agents lands a blow to his back with a hissing baton.

He turns on his heel and slices down with the blade. It catches the agent between their neck and shoulder, and they collapse with a wet scream. Sam has to wrench the sword out through the clinging viscera shaking out the ripples of electricity still tingling at his back. When he turns the agents are backed away, all eyeing him warily over the line of their dark green half-masks.

It’s not until he hears the clicking of metal that he realizes they are making room for Doom to stand in front of him. 

There is noise around him, there must be; he still sees Wanda’s red, flashing magic, there’s the crackle of Thor’s blue electric heat on his skin, and agents still fall like it’s what they were made to do around the shadow of Barnes at his peripheral, but Sam hears none of it.

“Kelly neglected to mention this new party trick.”

“Apparently she neglected to mention a lot to you.”

Doom shrugs, like it doesn’t matter in the least to him. “She wanted a fast solution to a problem bigger than she can comprehend, and she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. I should have expected it.”

“And what do you get out of dealing with her problem, exactly?”

“Well, had the original Captain showed, I would have had a complete set of super soldiers to duplicate for my army and along with Maximoff and Odinson, another path to my eventual immortal body. Not that it matters, to you. You’ll die here.”

Sam purses his lips. He hears that a lot, and ignores it. “You moustache twirling S.O.B.s all have the weakest motives. That’s unoriginal, man.”

Doom straightens. “I am no —”

“Oh my bad, you can’t grow a moustache anymore, can you? That was insensitive, I’m sorry.”

Sam blocks Doom’s baton, sparking with electricity, with Dáinsleif. He pushes forward, but at the last second Doom twists the baton out from underneath him.

“I will have that sword for myself, I think.” 

“Don’t think I can re-gift it, asshole,” Sam grunts as Doom batters him with quick hits to his sides: fast and in no particular order so Sam can’t catch his balance or guess their pattern to block. Then, without missing a beat, Doom stabs Sam’s gut with the end of the baton. As he stumbles backwards, Doom slices the baton down on Sam’s wrist, and he loses his grip on Dáinsleif.

He falls. 


	8. 08.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 12:31  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/08.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Eight**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/08.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_ **08.** _

Doom reaches out for Dáinsleif as it falls from Sam’s grip, but he no sooner touches the hilt than it folds in on itself, a switchblade again. It makes Sam smile as he cracks his head back against the asphalt. 

Snarling, Doom rears back, both hands fisted around the end of his baton, to drive it down into Sam’s chest. His thumb brushes the side of the baton’s shaft and a pointed blade emerges from the end of it, shining in the scnat lamplight dotting the street. As Sam rolls to dodge, winded and slower than he should be, Thor comes pummeling in from the left, Mjölnir slamming into Doom’s solar plexus. Thor hardly looks down to Sam before extending his hand to help him up. Wanda and Barnes stand back to back near the mouth of the street handling the straggling agents. They’ve cut the herd down by over half, and Sam takes vicious pleasure in watching Doom notice that fact as he rights himself. 

“You know,” Doom muses, sounding no little bit winded, “I think, actually, that you both deserve to die. The girl and that creature will suffice me.”

Sam knows killing Doom is out of the question; there’s no way he avoids the blowback from killing a head of state on his own sovereign ground, Accords or no. But when Doom produces another sparking baton from behind his back, spinning both of them around like little windmills or something, like some  _ asshole _ , Sam is sorely tempted. 

Thor sneers at his approach. “And you call us the fools.”

Suddenly, the batons blaze with so much electricty Sam can feel their buzzing in between his ears as Doom drops them, hissing at their burn as they clatter to the ground.

Breathing heavily, Doom looks up at Thor, the eye-holes in his mask void and black and shining. “That would still be you.”

Doom pulls out the gun from earlier, a sleek black thing that’s clearly custom made. Sam and Thor take either side of him. Sam grabs for the gun right as Doom fires, tearing a hole through Sam’s left forearm that sears and smarts like no other bullet Sam’s ever been hit with, as if the slug itself is barbed with little spikes that want to cling in the meat and bone they cut through.

Thor bellows as he pushes Sam aside, Doom already aiming again. Thor steps in front of the bullet when it comes, but seems shocked still as it makes him fumble backwards. His left shoulder is red and wet, the stain spreading on his blue shirt like it intends to swallow the whole thing up.

Sam throws his hand out, unsure exactly what prompts him or what he expects. Dáinsleif flies into his waiting grip like it’s drawn there by a magnet, and without pause Sam takes the hilt in both fists and swings it at Doom. Sam aims for where his arm crooks to elbow, but Doom is fast drawing back. Still, Sam has to blink twice when he realizes two of Doom’s fingers have fallen with the gun now on the ground.

Doom screeches as he grabs at the bleeding stumps with his other hand before fumbling again at his belt, but Sam doesn’t give him time to catch his balance. He drives the sword forward again, and the cuts the hand off at the wrist.

Sam wants to draw the sword back again, to keep slicing at Doom until he felt satisfied. But Thor leans on him heavily, breathing labored, and Sam lowers the blade. Doom had the time and means to develop something that could actually hurt Thor, and by the looks of it, he developed it successfully. Sam needs to get them all out, and quickly.

Doom swears as he stumbles back, looking down at his own hand in stunned disbelief. Wanda and Barnes, walking back from piles of unconscious bodies further up the street, share a conspiratorial look behind Doom’s back before Barnes gives her a little nod and Wanda kicks at his back with a wide, shiteating grin. Doom falls to his knees. 

“You will pay for this. You do not get to —” Doom can’t bite back a weak groan, his entire arm shaking as he cradles it to his chest. His breathing is wet and labored, and Sam feels no pity for him at all.

“What do you want to do, Cap?”

Sam looks up at Barnes slowly, his mouth a flat, thin line. There’s ‘want to do,’ and then there’s ‘have to do,’ and both of those two things exist for Sam on opposite ends of a very long spectrum right now.

It’s all the opportunity Doom needs to disappear like a blink.

Barnes and Sam both swear, looking around them for any glimpse. Wanda leaps up to the roof above them, trailing red behind her light feet. 

“I don’t see him,” she calls down. 

“I hate magic,” Barnes rumbles.

“What a mood,” Sam agrees, before Doom steps out of the darkness. A thin, curved blade shines in his hand, the stump of the other still held to his chest, staining the green cloak there.

“How many pockets does this asshole have?”

Sam is too busy dodging to answer Barnes. He’s ready to meet Doom’s parry with his own, but at the last second Doom twists the sword, and Thor takes it to his gut.

Hardly a coherent thought passes through Sam’s brain before plunging Dáinsleif into Doom’s chest, twisting the hilt as Doom falls gracelessly to Sam’s feet. He hardly has the blade folded and back in his pocket before reaching out for Thor. 

“ _ Wanda _ !” He and Barnes scream as they both try to catch Thor, stumbling backwards with one hand at his bleeding stomach, his face the surprised blankness of disbelief.

Doom gurgles on the street pathetically, spewing some vengeance and suffering shit Sam doesn’t have the patience for as he and Barnes try to ease Thor down so he doesn’t crack his skull to the asphalt with all his considerable weight behind him.

Wanda is white-lipped as she comes to a sloppy landing in front of them, kneeling over Thor’s body to put her glowing hands above his bleeding navel. It looks so similar to what Thor had tried to do in the square that Sam has to turn away. 

Doom is gone. So is Johnson. Thor is bleeding out at his feet. 

Sam hates his job. 

Barnes looks at him like he’s waiting for an order, and Wanda keeps glancing up between her red, slick hands and Sam’s face as well. Thor’s breathing is barely a wet rattle, but Sam has to shelve all of it to plan a way out before Doom and the LSF inevitably regroup for round two.

He steps away from their expectant looks and the noise of Thor’s slow death march, pinching his brow and trying to breathe deeply, and that’s when he hears it. 

Sam’s watch is ticking now at his wrist.  In the quiet, he can hear the little whirring gears in Barnes’ arm start to move. He looks up feeling half crazed and sees Johnson’s silhouette turning a corner at the very end of the street. 

Swearing, Sam digs the phone out of his jeans pocket. Tony answers on the first ring.

“How soon can we have a jet here?” 

“Keep your phone on, let me get your coordinates.”

* * *

“Tell your friend thanks from me when he wakes up. But we’re even now.”

Sam stares down at the text on his phone and thinks it’s not even the strangest puzzle piece of this entire week so far. 

A little self-piloting quinjet had landed on the rooftop next to them twenty minutes after calling Tony. It was a prototype stored in Sokovian rubble, where by all accounts none of them had any right to be anymore, much less use as personal storage. But Sam found, trying to squeeze his fumbling, useless hands underneath the unmoving weight of Thor’s shoulders, heavier than the force of gravity, heavier than the dread pooling in all the tiny vacancies in him — a sliver between each rib, in the hollowed knuckle of each vertebra, the squishy innards that knot together as his hands find no purchase in Thor’s uncooperative body — that he could not give a single shit less. Wanda had to pull him back with gentle, shaking hands before a little bed of red light lifted Thor from the ground. 

Tony and Bruce would meet them in Lausanne, where Tony’s mother had a summer home overlooking Lake Geneva. Sam pulled up the GPS on his phone and watched the arrival time shrink as Barnes sat next to him in the cockpit, where neither of  them were needed.

Wanda had sat cross-legged on the floor beside Thor’s bunk, one hand resting flat to the new, mottled, skin of his stomach their entire three hour journey. Thor hadn’t moved at all, either despite or because of her presence. She cast her eyes to Sam nervously, when he couldn’t help but poke his head back to watch the barely there rise of Thor’s chest, and told him quietly and no less than seven times that she was unable to mend all the little tears in his insides, and she didn’t know what else to do, and how she was sorry, sorry, sorry. 

Sam is not angry with her; her thin arms shake with strain, her face drawn and wan as she lifts Thor into the house when they are finally off the jet. Sam should be glad the darkness hides them from outside eyes, but he is too tired to manage even that. The only thing his body seems to have the energy for is plopping down in the scant space Thor leaves for him on one of the massive guest beds, looking at the slackness of Thor’s dry mouth, unmoving, and ignoring Barnes and Wanda quietly shuffling out of the dark room, feeling nothing but angry at himself. 

Johnson’s text thirty four minutes into his vigil hardly feels like anything. Bruce and Tony’s arrival six and a half hours later feels like nothing at all.

* * *

The morning after Riley fell, Sam forgot all about it.

Sam woke up ten minutes before his alarm to cornflower pre-dawn, a crick in his neck but a pleasant stretch to his back, both born of heavy sleep. He had rolled back over, enjoying the hazy colors and abstractions of not-yet-wakefulness behind his eyelids. It was the rainy season, and the air was cool around him, a bit wet, but only serving to cuddle him in further to the warm cocoon of his stiff, heavy blanket and the remembered reprieve of sleep. Good sleep.

His alarm rang even though he had wanted to lay in dozing stillness longer, and there was the bitter taste of medicine on his tongue as he walked to the sink to brush his teeth. The cool mint foam felt like hands around his throat when he remembered, staring at his own reflection in the mirror.

* * *

The morning he met Steve Rogers was spring-cool, damp with blue dew on the green grass, icy shadows peppering the asphalt from impersonal grey buildings that didn’t warm up at all no matter how many times they ran through them.

At the base of an oak tree, sweat in Sam’s vision and the criminally bright sun behind them, Steve’s nose sat a familiar kind of crooked on his smiling face. A welcome, painful kind of ugly.  

* * *

In Lausanne, the home of a woman he’ll never meet, he brushes his teeth in a stupidly ornate bathroom with a toothpaste he hasn’t used since last scrubbing sand out from behind his back molars.

Bruce and Wanda prod at Thor’s cold body in the other room. Sam sits on the lip of the big ceramic bathtub, looking for patterns in the blue and yellow swirls of the wallpaper, and waits for them to leave. 


	9. 09.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 17:50  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/09.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Nine**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/09.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**09.** _

Sam tries to sleep, in the four hours it takes from Bruce’s arrival for the velvet of Thor’s eyelids to flutter  — in the overstuffed chair in the room, the little seat in the bay window overlooking a barren garden, then in the sliver of available bed after locking the bedroom door from interlopers — but his mind and body both are worn out to the point of exhausted restlessness. Thor had broken out in a fever not long after Bruce and Wanda had started playing Operation, and Sam had filled the hours instead with switching out cool washcloths for Thor’s forehead and ice packs behind his neck, pretending it made a difference to anything but his guilt. Wanda and Bruce had reopened the wound to get a look at the full extent of the damage, and Sam had to leave, hating himself for not toughing it out each step out into the hall. He had gotten Thor in that bed, and now he couldn’t stay through the end of it.

Barnes had followed Sam wordlessly as he left the room then, and again when Sam finally convinced himself to go back. If Sam listens hard and breathes very quietly, he can hear the mechanical sounds of Barnes’ arm outside the bedroom now, can hear the tapping of his Crossy Road game.

Even Steve would have left by now, thinking Sam would need the space like Steve would need in his position, would have retreated to the garden like how Sam can see Wanda doing from the bedroom window.

Sam’s throat is thick with everything from the past few hours, and he is glad no one is there to see him swallow the lump down. Thor’s eyelids flutter again, and Sam lets himself believe it isn’t just the light. When Thor starts stirring in earnest, Sam attempts to rise from his perch on the bed to give Thor room to orient himself, but the brush of Thor’s fingers inside his wrist stop him.

Thor has to blink up at the ceiling for several seconds before looking carefully around the room; Sam follows his gaze and watches him check off the same places he would look for first, as well. The doors, the windows. Entry and exit points.

Then, to Sam, where they stay.

Sam has been waiting for hours, he’s arguably been waiting for weeks, but he’s got nothing to say. They look at each other in the quiet of this barely used home that still smells a bit like Chanel No. 5 and the dust of disuse, decorated like an expensive but impersonal hotel, and they say nothing.

Thor is the one to break the silence, the reedy rasp of his voice impossibly filling up the room.

“You saved my life.”

Sam has to bite back a little scream. “Is that what you think happened?”

Thor speaks sluggishly, each word an effort that seems to Sam like an act of Job. “You put yourself in danger to save me. I know the,” Thor takes a deep, wincing breath, and Sam bites his fingers into his knees. “You will face consequences for that. For me.”

“I should have never put you in that spot. I should have tried to train with that damn sword more before now, or...something. Don’t thank me, though. Not for that. You took a bullet for me, then this. I can’t...I can’t tell you how sorry I am. Nothing is enough.”

He had helped cut Thor’s shirt away when Bruce and Wanda went to stitch up the bullet wound on his shoulder, after Wanda re-sealed most of the cut on his stomach. It was sloppier than when she did it in the street; Bruce had to go over the irritated skin after with a needle and thread, but Sam didn’t mention it. It wasn’t _her_ fault, he reminded himself. Now, he watches the bandages crinkle and shift as Thor turns to his side. His hips are a cradle, fever warm, cupping Sam’s body.

Thor is gentle, like he is not the one who is hurt, taking one of Sam’s hands into both of his own. His mouth burns unbearably soft when he bends forward to kiss the back of it. The promise of his beard not-quite rasping the skin there, just its welcoming heat, is a torture.

His big, rough thumbs brush the memory of the kiss away like the tide, but still he holds Sam’s hand in his overwarm grip.

“I owe you a blood debt. My life. You got everyone out alive. You could have left me there.”

Sam wants to reel back, horrified. “Of course I couldn’t have.”

Thor just grins at him, dopey as if he has won something, before trailing his fingers up to the bandage Bruce had wrapped around Sam’s left forearm. Sam remembers Bruce picking shrapnel out of the meat there like an observer in his own body, but it feels like years past now. Wanda had tried to mend it herself, first, but had ended up with her head between her knees in a kitchen chair, breathing heavily while Barnes stood behind her, patting her hair with his non-cyborg hand and looking straight ahead.

Sam doesn’t remember anything else about it, had forgotten about the injury altogether until now. He lets Thor peel the gauze off silently. Whatever Thor wants to do, he’s earned that.

“Will you let me know if this hurts you, Sam?”

“What?”

Thor’s fingers are starting to glow. Sam is going to have an aneurysm.

“ _Heal yourself first_!”

Thor ignores him. Sam’s arm starts to warm from the inside out, from his suddenly loose feeling fingers to his elbow, an easy rhythm like a warm tide, lapping at the shore and backwards again, easy with the promise of return. When Sam dares look down, his limb is as orange and transparent as Thor’s hands. The backlit red lines of his radius, the knobby joints in his fingers, look vulnerable and weak like this, and he turns his head away like he’s being poked with a needle at the doctor’s office.

“Does it hurt?”

“My sense of crazy, yes. Please stop and work on yourself.”

“You wouldn’t heal _your_ self first,” Thor points out. Sam resolutely doesn’t look down or answer.

Sam realizes after a moment that Thor is done but still cupping his arm between both hands. His face is sweaty and wan, but he is grinning when Sam finally looks down at him. A puckered, pink scar is new on the inside of Sam’s arm like a starburst, but the top is smooth and clean. It doesn’t even ache.

“Maybe I was right.”

He looks up to Thor’s face, utterly bemused. Thor drops his hands to flop back on the pillows.

“That it would come to me, when I really needed it,” he specifies.

There is a knock on the door, and Sam can’t decide if his gratitude outweighs his frustration.

“Come in.”

Bruce pokes his curly head in first, and before he schools his face into pleasant neutrality Sam watches it brighten with a smile he’s never seen before. Tony follows him, looking oddly, genuinely tired.

Thor accepts Sam’s help to sit upright, and when Bruce steps close to poke around Thor’s injuries, he allows Thor to press their foreheads together briefly.

“Thank you, friend.”

Bruce smiles again; his usual, small one. “Thank me by not ripping anymore of your stitches, please. These aren’t meant for Asgardians as is.”

Thor has the decency to look a tiny bit chastised. “I will try.” He looks around to the door, clearly expecting the others. “Wanda and James? Are they injured?”

Tony scrubs a hand over his face with a ragged exhale. “How do you two feel about Switzerland?”

“...What’s happened?” Sam asks slowly, dread starting to seep away the warm contentment that had settled in his chest.

Tony and Bruce share a pained look.

“Well,” Bruce begins delicately, only for Tony to start steamrolling over him in his usual, hyperverbal way.

“Good news: Doom is in the ICU. Doom may actually not live, which. Well. Bad news, scratch that, _very_ bad news — actually, let’s make that awful, no good, _very bad_ news: Doom ‘leaked’ the footage of you running him through with that steak knife. Kelly has seized it and said you went rogue.”

Here, Tony pauses uncharacteristically. Bruce clears his throat.

“She...said you were the first of a long list of Captain America. Ah. Impersonators. Copy-cats. Then she linked a few other...incidents to you.” Bruce finishes, looking at a spot on the wall above Sam’s head.

Thor is shaking to Sam’s left. The whole bed trembles.  
“What can be done?”

“You’re about to keel over, Point-Break. Take a Xanax. We’re handling it, so don’t upset Bruce by undoing his work. I don’t want to deal with that.”

“Tony,” Bruce sighs, pinching between his eyebrows.

Sam nudges Thor’s knee with his own. “It’s really not the worst thing that could be happening right now.”

“ _Yet_ ,” Tony adds. “We have the footage of Kelly asking us to meet to rebuke her statement, but if we could track down _Johnson_ it would help your case _tremendously_.”

Sam looks at Thor out of the corner of his eye, from his furrowed brow down over his bare chest and stomach, mottled underneath its bandages. Since getting Thor on the plane, Sam hasn’t been able to stop himself from listening for his watch, expecting it to stop ticking again at any moment as if it was somehow connected to Thor’s continued breathing. Objectively, Sam knows it’s ridiculous, thinking about it like that. But when Sam is quiet, he can hear the watch ticking in time with Thor’s inhales and exhales. It doesn’t feel so dumb, when he thinks about the unbearable silence on a Latverian street; no watch, no wings, no shield, no Thor.

He exhales slowly. This is, undoubtedly, wrong. But Sam is going to do it anyway, whatever that says about him.

“I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Tin Man. Or that it’s a good use of our time right now.”

Tony mashes his lips in a flat line and stares at him, equally level. “Sam. Cough it up, whatever it is.”

_She saved his life._

Sam looks up to the ceiling. “Johnson will have her day. We might even give it to her. But...for now, is there any way to get the rest of that footage from Latveria? What Doom deleted from that clip? It would be better in the court of public opinion than the testimony of a felon, and you know I am right,” he adds firmly when Tony looks ready to interrupt him again.

“‘ _Is there any way_ ,’” Tony grumbles. “What do you think we’ve been doing while you locked yourself away up here , Florence Nightingale? Do you know what I had to bribe Lewis with to get her to help? And still I get spoken to like _I’m_ the freeloading amateur.”

“Lewis?” Sam echoes, surprised.

“Darcy is apparently an...amaterur hactivist,” Bruce says slowly, voice carefully neutral as he looks to Thor. Sam will press on this later. “She said she watched a TED Talk, or something.”

“Either way,” Tony huffs. “Sam, lest you want to be scooped up by the U.S. government, you’ll stay here until we get everything sorted. Wanda and Cryborg are being carted back to the compound, to Barnes’ _immense_ displeasure,” Tony finishes with a vicious grin.

“Why would they leave if Sam has to stay?” Thor frowns, cracking his knuckles. Some of the skin on his hands still looks jaundiced in places, like the magic hasn’t fully receded yet.

Tony shrugs. “They weren’t in any of the footage, so we need them clear of the blast radius for now. It was just you two. Almost like Doom had something... _personal_ against you? And wouldn’t you just feel up to sharing with Uncle Tony considering all the work you’re making me put in when I am, you know, technically retired and that —”

“Alright, Tony, that’s enough. Let them rest.”

Sam sends Bruce a grateful look as he shoos a still babbling Tony out the door, shutting it behind them with a soft but firm click.

It is quiet.

“I told you,” Thor murmured. “Consequences. Now they think you a criminal.”

Sam has quips aplenty about that, how he’s used to it for one reason or another, but Thor is alive and regardless of Tony’s dumb barbs, Sam trusts that he and Bruce and even Lewis will do what they can to mitigate some of this damage, and the certainty of both of those things is the permission his body needs to rest.

Before Sam allows himself to settle, he gets Thor a glass of water from the bathroom and fusses over his bandages, then a new washcloth for his face, but eventually Thor grabs his hand and gives it the smallest of tugs.

“What would make me feel better now is for you to rest, Sam.”

Thor makes a little show of wiggling over to one side of the bed.

Oh no. Bad idea. No. No. Sam is not that kind of dumbass.

His phone pings with a new text message where it’s charging on the nightstand. Thor has the gall to pat the space beside him lightly with the barest tips of his fingers.

Sam gets in bed. He pulls the sheets up, looks at Thor for a long minute, and rolls over to face the opposite wall.

The text message is from Barnes.

“You know where to find me.”

There is a second one that follows.

“And me. Yours most sincerely, Steven Grant Rogers,” with water droplet and hamburger emojis trailing after, because he is a little _shit_ who refuses to grasp basic emoji humor or syntax.

Thor is breathing evenly next to him, and underneath the blankets is, for lack of a better phrase, downright toasty. Sam curls his toes and locks his phone and buries his face in his pillow.

Being a fugitive again is not ideal, but in the ways that matter Sam thinks he’s doing alright.  

* * *

Thor sleeps most of the next two days. Even Sam has to take a day and a half to convince himself to leave the bed, much less the room. Bruce comes up to check on them both regularly in the meantime, and when Sam’s rumbling stomach finally convinces him to venture to the kitchen for something of substance to eat, it’s Bruce who finds him there.

It is the most casual Bruce has ever looked, leaning against the counter. He’s even barefoot. Sam has to do a double take before going back to spreading Nutella on a plain piece of white bread.

He pauses with the bread midway to his mouth. “Thank you, Bruce.”

Bruce waves him off, and Sam has the genuine impression that he truly doesn’t think of it as anything.

“No, really,” Sam presses. “I’m sorry I put you and...and the Big Guy in the position that you had to come do this.”

Bruce digs a spoon out of the drawer near his hip and dunks it into the Nutella jar.

“I’m glad you two are talking again. Asgardians — Thor, especially — they’re resilient. Physically, Thor’s cells regenerate even faster than Steve’s or mine do.” He pops the spoon in his mouth, and Sam waits for him to swallow. “It upset me, to be honest. When you acted the way you did to him in New York,” Bruce says lightly, looking at the doorway and not at Sam at all. “I was very upset with you.”

Sam’s mouth nearly drops open. He looks around for eavesdroppers before focusing back to Bruce, speaking lowly. “Is...is the Hulk gonna try and give me...the shovel talk? Is that what we’re doing right now?”

Bruce barely nudges Sam’s shoulder with his own before popping his _used spoon_ back in the Nutella jar. “Just Bruce, for now.”

He exits the kitchen silently. Sam can only stare after him.


	10. 10.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 11:26  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/10.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Ten**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/10.mp3)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**10.** _

Tony is called back to New York the next day, caught trying to skip another commencement speech for “Avengers business.” Bruce goes with him, after tutting once more over Thor’s nearly healed stomach. He watches Thor hold a glowing hand to the remaining injury with a gleam in his eye Sam can only describe as “ _Science!_ ” before allowing Thor to grab both his hands and press his brow to Bruce’s knuckles. There is something about it that makes Sam feel like he’s intruding on a private moment where he lurks by the door.

Sam knew Thor and Bruce were _friends_ , hell, after their welcome home party he knew they were close like he and Steve are. But there is an open trust that Thor looks at Bruce with, a patience Bruce shows Thor clearly rooted in genuine respect, that makes Sam realize how much they _love_ each other. He hasn’t talked to Bruce since having to toss the entire jar of Nutella in the garbage yesterday, but he is suddenly very grateful Bruce came to help when he did.

Sam walks Tony and Bruce out to where Happy waits in the circular driveway, leaning against the hood of a (for Tony) modest black Jaguar.

Bruce hardly spares Sam a nod and absent smile before clapping Happy warmly on the shoulder and ducking into the backseat — Sam and Tony both do a double take, and Happy just smirks at them smugly — but Tony doesn’t move from the front steps. He lowers his sunglasses to the tip of his nose to peer over them at Sam, looking utterly ridiculous.

“Don’t rack up an expensive electricity bill for me here, buddy. Lights off when you’re not in the room. Better yet, have the big dude handle it, since he’s feeling better.”

“But when’s the masseuse coming? My personal shopper?”

“We just got out of a recession,” Tony shrugs as he takes the steps down two at a time. “We all had to cut back, even me.”

“But what about the _pool boy_?!” Sam cries, like it’s an outrage.

Tony glances over his shoulder as he slides in the car. “You’ll have your hands too full to miss him.”

Sam nearly stumbles backwards as the car takes off without any preamble.

_Asshole_.  

* * *

The house is both too big and too small all at once, when it’s just the two of them in it. Thor is curled up with a Agatha Christie novel from the bookshelf in their bedroom when Sam peeks in to check on him a few hours later, and Sam wanders aimlessly through all the other rooms — on the first floor, all the rooms _twice_ — before finally perching in the den and turning on a German soap.

A few episodes in, Sam listens to Thor take the stairs down to the kitchen right as Tanja von Lahnstein is framing Nathalie for Kitty Kübler’s murder. He is tempted to let Thor rustle around in there, audibly and for long enough Sam knows something has to be wrong, to finish out this episode. But his ass is numb from sitting so long, and this is the type of show his mother would call ‘brain rot,’ so Sam forces himself to turn off the TV.

The kitchen’s many windows take up more surface area than its white tiled walls. They slant late afternoon light in to reflect off the copper pots hanging above the marble-topped island and the Space Prince standing in it both. Thor pokes around in the cabinets next to the deep sink, shirtless and desperately in need of a shave. He has two matching scars now to the one on Sam’s arm, shiny pink stars that lined up correctly could maybe be their own constellation.

Sam freezes in the doorway.

_Wilson, if you don’t stay in your lane._

He clears his throat and hopes it helps clear all that useless pining shit from his brain.

“You know what you’re doing there?”

Thor looks at all the ingredients in front of him, hands on his hips. He picks up a medium saucepan after visible deliberation, holding it aloft.

“Water,” he says confidently.

“That’s more than what Nat would have known to do with it,” Sam concedes. “No one is perfect.”

He pries the crockery from Thor’s hands slower than is really necessary just to be close enough to breathe in the smell of Thor’s warm skin a little longer.

“You don’t think some people are? That some people are at least close?” Thor asks after a moment of watching Sam fill the pot with water from the sink.

“Fishing for compliments?” Sam smirks over his shoulder as he turns one of the burners on. “Not very princely.”

Sam looked like a five star chef next to Steve, Barnes, and Natasha, and like a culinary god next to Vision and Clint, but objectively Sam knows he’s just decent. Sam cooks to eat, with just a few special things — this mac and cheese being one of them, not that it means anything — in his back pocket to impress potential overnight guests. Even then, he doesn’t _enjoy_ it, really. But before Riley he couldn’t even manage this. Now, at least, he has a good memory to get him through the tedious chopping and waiting and wiping down.

He feels Thor’s eyes on him as he reaches in the fridge for some of the chicken Happy had brought in with his grocery haul yesterday. Between Sam and Riley’s first and second tours — and it’s odd thinking of either of them so young and green, even in memory — Riley had taken Sam home to his little Nashville suburb and taught him the basics of feeding himself.

“No woman is going to want to settle down with a man who has a higher ass than they do, Wilson, so you gotta stop counting on settling down with a nice girl and learn to feed your own damn self.”

Sam can still hear Riley ribbing him for sloppiness as he fiddles around the cabinets looking for things to season the chicken with, and he can’t keep a dopey smile off his face. He ends up having to improv from his usual recipe, but it smells decent enough. Sam pours the pasta in the now boiling water and heats up some oil in another pan. When it starts rolling, Sam plops the chicken in, enjoying the searing noise it makes and the smell of it filling the kitchen, sinking into orange around them from the setting sun.

Thor is staring at him in a way that seems too intent and serious for just standing beside a stove. Sam tries for a smile.

“I guess I should have asked if you have any allergies. If you people have that sort of thing.”

Thor leans back against the island, his arms crossed over his chest. “I wish I could help you without ruining your work.”

Sam tosses him a block of cheese, which Thor catches thoughtlessly. “I hope you didn’t think I was just going to _serve_ you. Work for your meal. Grate that, I’ll supervise.”

Thor bends the grater in his grip twice, but it gets done. Sam even fries some bacon off in the pan once the chicken is done and resting on the counter, because after the week they’ve had they’ve both earned the extra fat.

After Sam allows Thor to help chop up the chicken, he ladles them both massive bowls and sprinkles the bacon on top. Thor stares at the bowls like he has never seen food before in his entire, long life. Sam digs around the fridge to avoid looking at him too long.

“I know this isn’t fancy space beer, but it’s this or tap water.”

Thor has both bowls balanced in both hands very gently, as if they were baby birds or something else he’s scared of breaking if he grips too hard. He smiles at Sam, equally soft, as Sam holds the bottles aloft in between them. It makes Sam’s chest clench to a stuttering stop.

“The earth beer will suffice. I only hate that your meal deserves better,” Thor finishes with a wink. Who does that? _Who does that?_ Who does that and doesn’t look like an asshole?

Sam’s face is very stupidly hot. He leads them to the living room where they plop on either ends of the sofa. As big as they are, they’re mostly still pressed together. It feels that way to Sam, anyway.

He turns _Verbotene Liebe_ back on, easy enough to get back into. The food is good. Thor tells him as much after roughly every fourth or fifth bite.

Dusk outside has fallen from lavender to an inky blue when Thor reaches over for Sam’s empty bowl. On the screen, Nathalie has cleared her name from Kitty’s murder, but is now in the hospital for complications with her pregnancy. Sam hardly glances from the television as he holds the bowl out for Thor to take.

Thor takes it from Sam’s hands and immediately places it on the coffee table in front of them.

Sam snorts. “Was that you cleaning up?”

Thor doesn’t say anything, unsmiling as he looks at Sam. Sam feels his face fall the longer Thor stares at him.

Slowly, Thor reaches over to brush the corner of Sam’s bottom lip with his thumb. Sam has forgotten how lungs work, even in theory. Thor’s fingers cup Sam’s chin (Sam hasn’t even been shaving neatly, if at all, while they were here; he _regrets_ so much about his life), and his thumb is a rough, warm drag against Sam’s mouth. As Thor takes his hand away Sam sees some cheese sauce on Thor’s thumb (oh, so he’s just been sitting here like a dumbass who can’t feed himself at thirty-eight, sure, yeah, cool, that’s fine, that’s _fine_ ) before Thor brings it to his own mouth, licking the sauce clean.

Sam watches him, unblinking, each second a separate photograph for Sam to keep for whenever Thor moves away. The part of Thor’s lips, the ragged cuticle on his thumb nail, a freckle to the right of his nose. Minute details to file away and revisit later, when Thor is not still so close. He’s so focused on all the little parts —  the parentheses around Thor’s mouth, the little crow’s feet netting out from his eyes, even the skin between his eyelashes — that Sam doesn’t notice Thor moving closer until he is pressing his mouth to the corner of Sam’s own.

Thor doesn’t touch him except the bristled, dry press of his kiss, chaste and soft, to Sam’s bottom lip.

Sam’s brain is frying, he thinks he can hear the little sizzling pops of his neurons fizzling out to uselessness. He opens his mouth —  to breathe, because when was the last time he did that, or to respond, because how could he not — and Thor pulls away like he’s been tugged back from behind.

His useless, rubbery brain can’t communicate a single sufficient thought to his heavy, useless tongue. His mouth still feels Thor’s pressed against it, like holding onto the skin memory would beckon him back.

“I’m sorry,” Thor rasps, then leaves.


	11. 11.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
>  **Title:** Ride The Lightning  
>  **Length:** 20:18  
>  **Format:** MP3  & Streaming  
>  **Cover Artist:** [ dentigerous](http://archiveofourown.org/users/dentigerous/pseuds/dentigerous)
> 
>   
>  [**Mobile Streaming**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/11.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Chapter Eleven**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/11.mp3)  
> 
> 
> [**Download All MP3s (Zipped) [3:33:15]**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/%5bMCU%5d%20Ride%20The%20Lightning%20MP3s.zip)  
> 
> 
> [**Download Audiobook (M4B) [3:33:15]**](http://rscreighton.parakaproductions.com/Podfic/201709/Ride%20the%20Lightning/%5bMCU%5d%20Ride%20the%20Lightning.m4b)  
>  _(Right-Click, Save. THANK YOU, PARAKA)_

_**11.** _

Sam does not follow Thor up to his bedroom that night. He finally manages to stretch out on the couch after almost twenty minutes of staring out to middle distance, and when he’s not pretending to sleep he’s staring at their empty, matching bowls on the coffee table in front of him.

Of course, Sam  _ wants  _ to talk about it. Sam  _ wants  _ to knock on Thor’s door and demand an explanation. More than that, because Sam is selfish and thinking only with his  _ dick _ , he wants to pick up where they left off. Now that Sam knows that was an option — knows that they  _ could  _ have done that,  _ could  _ have stayed on the couch or fallen to the floor, Sam straddling Thor’s thighs, kissing down the sweep of his collarbone, their rough hands slotted together — he can’t think of anything else but all the ways that could have turned out.

If Thor had chosen to stay. But he didn’t. He left, clearly embarrassed and regretful, and Sam won’t make him suffer that with an audience knowing it would make Thor feel worse.

But. 

But, that resolve doesn’t shake the imagined drag of Thor’s hands on him, under Sam’s shirt, nails raking down his chest. Lower, the waistband of his jeans. Lower still.

Sam rolls over and smooshes his face in one of the throw pillows.

At 2:27 am, he gets a text. He can’t convince himself to open it for another ten minutes. 

It’s Tony; Sam regrets convincing himself to open it. 

“Turn on  the news.”

Sam’s head feels thick and useless on his stiff neck, but he does as the text asks. He does have a job to do, after all. Isn’t that what landed him here in the first place?

He flips between several news channels, all showing variations on the same “BREAKING NEWS” headline.

Sam watches Doom shoot him in the arm while running his fingers along the smooth, new scar in real time. He watches Thor push him out of  the way in grainy CCTV, taking the next bullet in his shoulder. When Doom reappears, that curved sword raised, Sam turns the channel. He doesn’t need to see it again. The next channel has Kelly in the conference room where this shitstorm started. The next channel is a profile on Sam himself. They even got ahold of his eleventh grade yearbook photo.

That’s good. That should be good. He and Thor can go home now; everything is fine. 

He turns off the TV as his phone rings again.

“No thank you? Nothing? U busy?” Tony sends, punctuated with eggplant and lightning bolt emojis. Sam doesn’t even have the energy to throw his phone across the room.

* * *

He manages to doze, woken to weak midmorning sunlight by the noise of Thor in the kitchen. Their bowls from last night are gone from the coffee table.

Sam sits up slowly and is careful to remain quiet and unseen as he pads up the stairs and into the bathroom for a shower and to brush the sour taste from his mouth. Hopefully this gives Thor the time to leave the kitchen and avoid Sam, if he still wants to do that. 

But as Sam pokes his head in the kitchen, he realizes apparently Thor does not want to do that. He is leaned up against the sink, clean dishes laid out in the drying rack next to him.

Okay. Sam can talk now, and blame everything he inevitably says wrong on the lack of coffee in his system later.

“...Good morning.”

Thor swallows thickly before dipping his head in greeting. “Good morning, Sam.”

“You feeling okay?” It feels so inadequate and disingenuous to what Sam wants to say that it’s uncomfortably close to a lie. Sam buckles down on it, though, bending to grab some orange juice from the refrigerator and trying to look casual. 

Thor clears his throat. “I want to apologize for last night.”

That hurts, even though Sam expected it. But Sam deals with it, because that’s what Sam does. 

He shrugs. “You really don’t have to.”

“I made you uncomfortable,” Thor tells the kitchen floor or his bare feet one, decidedly not looking up to Sam.

Perhaps it’s a blessing, as Sam forgets how to swallow around his mouthful of juice and nearly chokes as it sits on his tongue too long.

“What?”

Thor, pink-eared, looks at a spot above Sam’s head. “I know, before, I made you uncomfortable with my...I told you I just wanted your friendship, and then I couldn’t keep that promise, and I —” he cuts himself off with a deep breath before trying to speak more slowly. “I am sorry. I know you don’t want that from me. I was thoughtless.”

Sam’s body goes so loose he nearly drops his juice from his lax, numb fingers. His ears ring and he nearly spills the glass again as he fumbles it to the countertop.

“You what? Promised — what?  _ I  _ didn’t want?”

Thor raises a hand like he’s going to put it on Sam’s shoulder before clearly re-thinking it. “Are you alright?”

Sam can only gape at Thor for a very long minute. He is wearing one of Sam’s shirts, but even Thor’s broad chest and shoulders stretching the cotton to transparency and a new hole in the shoulder seam big enough to fit Sam’s thumb in isn’t enough to distract Sam.

“In the quinjet,” Sam says slowly, “you told me you didn’t want anything from me but —  _ you said _ you just wanted to be  _ friends _ .”

Thor frowns at him. “And if you don’t want anything but that, that  _ is _ all I want. But before then you acted like I was...you wouldn’t  _ talk  _ to — after the  _ lizards _ ,” Thor flounders, flustered.

“I was trying to talk to you about it!” Sam manages after several failed attempts at speech. “But before I even got to try and...explain myself, you told me you weren’t interested! What was I supposed to do? Make an ass of myself and make you uncomfortable?”

It is unbearably quiet. They can hear the water from the lake outside, the occasional  _ woosh  _ of a passing car. Thor licks at his lips.

“So then,” he begins, his voice so soft it’s unrecognizable. “You aren’t...opposed? To that, with me?”

Sam walks forward slowly, each movement broadcast so Thor could step back, push Sam away, if he wanted. But Sam gets close enough to slide his hands around Thor’s neck, rocking up to his toes, and Thor does nothing but close his eyes to meet him halfway. 

For as long as Sam has waited and pretended to not be waiting for this kiss, it’s more lazy and less urgent than he maybe would have imagined. They take their time with tentative touches that each feel like a request for permission until Sam dares to press Thor back against the counter, firm with intent. Thor shudders when Sam takes his top lip in his mouth, and when Thor’s hands trail unbearably light under the hem of Sam’s shirt, tracing the arc of his hip bones before starting on the downwards V they make into the waistband of his sweats, Sam pulls away.

“I don’t wanna assume anything here, but I refuse for the first time I have sex with you to be in Tony’s dead mother’s kitchen.”

Thor’s eyes are so glassy Sam feels a certain pride curl in his belly. 

“What about other places in her home?”

Sam fists one hand in the short hair at the back of Thor’s head as he licks into Thor’s mouth before trailing down his jaw, then the shell of his ear.

“Tony probably deserves at least that,” Sam reasons directly into the skin of Thor’s shoulder. Thor’s hands are back inside Sam’s shirt, rubbing down the line of Sam’s back. Sam wants to arch into it like a cat, the long, passing sweeps of Thor’s palms coaxing his brain to uselessness. After a moment of hesitation, one of Thor’s hands trails down and squeezes at Sam’s ass.

Sam laughs into the side of Thor’s neck, and as Thor nuzzles into the crown of Sam’s head he can feel Thor smiling sheepishly against his scalp.

“I’m sorry. I’ve been trying to resist.”

Sam leans up to suck Thor’s bottom lip between his teeth. “You don’t have to.”

Thor groans as he lifts Sam up by the back of his thighs, seemingly content to hold Sam aloft in perpetuity before Sam gets his legs around Thor’s waist. The new press of Sam’s very interested dick to Thor’s taut stomach through his jeans is a pleasure to grind into.

“I should be carrying you,” Sam manages between kisses. “Being injured and all.”

Thor smiles into the kiss, his fingers digging into Sam’s thighs. “I would like that.” He pulls away so Sam can see his swollen red mouth, his eyes swallowed up by his black pupil. “Do you think you could, one day?”

Sam drinks in the soft, open expression on Thor’s face. His throat feels syrupy tight, but Sam’s chest is warm with something light and buoyant. They’ve gone straight to “in too deep” territory, but Sam can’t help but find it’s a magnificent place to be.

“I’ll find a gym now and start practicing my deadlifts, if you want.”

Thor presses their lips together. “Right now, it is not what I want the most.”

“Thank god.”

Sam arches his neck as Thor sucks bruises down the line of it. They stumble more than once as Thor walks them blindly to the stairs; Sam probably nearly dies on the fourth step, but Thor catches him with an apologetic peck to his temple. It doesn’t matter. They make it to the bedroom, and as Thor releases him to fall back on the soft mattress, Sam can’t think of a single other thing he cares about.

“I promise to woo you properly, you know.”

Sam rolls his eyes and pretends Thor’s words don’t set butterflies loose in his stomach.  He mouths at the new scar on Thor’s shoulder when Thor crawls on top of him before pushing Thor flat to the bed.

“Consider me already wooed. Why else would I be giving you an outstanding blow job right now?”

Thor blinks. “What?”

Sam is already trailing wet, sloppy kisses down Thor’s chest, stopping to lavish attention at the little dip of his belly button, dusted in coarse hair. He doesn’t think he needs to explain himself again. 

He hooks his thumbs in the waistband of Thor’s sweats and rolls them down slowly, even as Thor lifts his hips up eagerly to assist. Sam peppers each inch of revealed skin with kisses as he peels them from Thor’s thighs and further down his legs, finally tossing them off the bed with a kiss to the knob of Thor’s left ankle.

Thor has gone commando, and the slick, heavy length of him curving up towards his belly makes Sam’s mouth go dry. How long would it take them to open Sam up for that? How long could he have Thor’s mouth licking him open, coaxing him to pliancy; how many different ways could Sam work that inside of him?

Quick as a blink, he imagines the stretching width of Thor’s fist before he shakes it free. It’s not the time for that, today. 

Under Sam’s scrutiny, Thor starts to fidget, almost like he wants to cover himself. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to.”

Objectively, Sam also knows it could have been a tentacle or something. “I do want to, it’s just — we’re gonna need to work up to  _ all  _ of it.”

The principle is the same. Before Sam can overthink it, he wraps his lips around the rosy head and gets to work. Thor mewls in ways Sam didn’t know he could as Sam hollows his cheeks on the girth he can fit his mouth around. Sam is close to purring himself; he hasn’t felt this in too long — the perfect, salty weight on his tongue, the hands at the nape of his neck that pet and grip and push, the smell of skin and sweat so close. 

Thor pulls away.

“I was busy,” Sam says hoarsely.

“I was aware,” Thor shoots back, breathless. “I don’t want to come yet.”

Sam stills where he’s still half crouched above Thor. Oh.

He could — they could work with that. 

Sam crawls up over Thor to seal their lips together. Thor bites his nails into Sam’s back and drags them down hard enough Sam hisses under the touch. He feels Thor grin against his mouth, and also feels it fall quickly as Sam weasels a hand between them to give Thor a few firm strokes. Sam’s hand only just manages to wrap around the width of him, still slick from Sam’s own mouth, and he feels in himself a new, imaginary absence where this could fit.

Thor’s hips stutter forward to the touch. “Sam, I. I said I don’t want to —”

“So don’t,” Sam half-shrugs, blasé and biting down a smile. He keeps his pace steady, and Thor makes no real effort to free himself from Sam’s attention. Thor’s neck is thrown back in a surprisingly graceful arc, bobbing with his labored breathing. Sam has half a mind to rake his teeth down all the bumps and ridges exposed to him there, to bite where there’s give until there isn’t any, but doesn’t know how far to push it. He settles for little kisses upward instead, and the vibrations of Thor’s pleading want straight to his lips. 

“But,” Sam murmurs into the satiny skin behind Thor’s ear, “I hope you do.” He takes the lobe between his teeth and bites it just to feel Thor shudder. “I want to have something to fuck you with.”

It’s hardly out of his mouth before Thor’s release ribbons his chest, Sam’s hand, and most of the sheets around them. Sam blinks down in disbelief as Thor, boneless beneath him, reaches up to cup Sam’s face in his hand.

“You are a beautiful, cruel man,” Thor rasps, guiding Sam down for a kiss.

“There’s so much,” Sam says dumbly against Thor’s mouth. Thor laughs as he pulls away and pushes Sam back with little effort. He straddles Sam’s middle, propped up on his knees, eyes blown black and glassy. Without looking away from Sam, Thor pops his fingers into his mouth, sucking them with so little shame Sam’s whole body flushes. He trails them down through his own release before beginning to pry himself open, looking at Sam all the while like Sam is the one giving him a gift, when Sam can really only wrap a firm hand around the base of his cock and think about Tony in a dress and factorials and everything else unsexy while wondering what he’s done to deserve Thor straining above him like this. 

Sam is so enraptured in the soft part of Thor’s mouth, the little furrows of his brow that smooth out only to scrunch back up whenever he crooks his fingers the right way, that when Thor’s hand wraps around Sam’s length to guide him in Sam nearly loses it on the spot.

Thor’s hand is hot but oddly gentle around him, and he stares down at Sam like he can’t help himself but a few soft strokes before fitting Sam to his entrance and easing his way down. Little stars erupt behind Sam’s eyelids as he feels Thor’s welcoming heat around him, and he reaches up to bite his fingers in Thor’s hips and guide him flush to Sam’s own.

It is very still, and quiet. 

With a drawn out exhale, Thor leans forward, his forearms braced on the pillows bracketing Sam’s face. Sam tilts his face up in an invitation Thor meets with a soft, slow kiss before he starts to move.

As close to coming as Sam was not two minutes ago, the pressing coil of heat in his belly seems further away now that he’s got other things to worry about; the brush of Thor’s eyelashes against his neck as he buries his face at the juncture of Sam’s shoulder, their hands twining together and the drag of their fingers against each other, the knob of each knuckle something special that Sam thinks he should know better. 

They move together slowly, unhurried now that they’ve crossed the threshold that lead them here. Thor kisses him with a tenderness that’s close to reverence as his rhythm starts to falter. Sam just nods against the kiss, their noses smooshed together, tangling his fingers in Thor’s hair as he drives up into him. 

Thor lets out three quick, small gasps for air before he comes and takes Sam with him, Sam’s release full of sweet, easy give like on overripe peach, soft with waiting for the right thumb or set of teeth to press against its skin.

It’s so easy it feels practiced when Thor rolls off of Sam to pull him to his side, a parenthesis to his ribs and chest, glistening with sweat. There is stickiness between them that Sam knows he’s going to regret not wiping off, but his boneless body is comfortable exactly how it is, one leg thrown over Thor’s, his face close enough to the pink scar on Thor’s chest that Sam can’t forget that Thor lived, they survived, and they’re here together, so a little grossness isn’t about to sway him from sleep.

* * *

Sam wakes to twilight, immobile, but only partly because of Thor’s heavy arm slung over him, keeping him close in the dim, purple light of the bedroom.

He elbows Thor in the chest. It takes a few tries before Thor’s erratic snores cease and he blinks his way to consciousness.

“What’s wrong?” He slurs.

“Your — your fucking  _ jizz _ glows in the  _ dark _ !”

* * *

They are only back in New York for four days when the giant, fork-tongued, feathered lizards find them, because this is just Sam Wilson’s life now.

He and Thor are stepping out of Dinosaur BBQ, hand in hand, when the beast rounds the corner, screeching and swinging its spiked tail.

Thor deflates beside him.

“I wanted to bed you tonight.”

“After Dinosaur?” Sam scoffs.  “Lizards or no, I’m going to  _ sleep _ .” 

Sam squeezes Thor’s hand before he reaches in his pocket for Dáinsleif. “Let’s finish this so we can go home, Big Guy.”

Thor smiles at Sam with so much fondness as he holds his hand out for Mjölnir that Sam nearly forgets Skeletor at the end of  the street. Apparently Thor is as much of a fool as Sam is, because Mjölnir is hardly in his hand before he leans down to press a kiss to Sam’s stupidly grinning mouth, his hands heavy and warm at Sam’s hips.

The job isn’t all bad. 

Mostly bad, maybe. But there are perks.

The lizard wails, and Sam pries Thor’s hands off of him, still smiling until he notices Thor’s face, looking down at Sam’s hands.

Sam’s hands; Dáinsleif in one, Mjölnir in the other. 

He shoves the hammer into Thor’s chest, his stomach a strange, twisting churn.

“We’re just gonna have to deal with that later.”

**Author's Note:**

> Infinite thanks to Rose, who made the most increible podfic of this dumb little story with the patience of Job, Linda who fought me on every em-dash as my beta, and the SWBB mods who have made this the single best bang experience to ever hit the interweb ;)
> 
> and you! Thanks for reading. Feedback is always appreciated -- more than I can say :)


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